Frishy Cooks

Watch Me on Your iPod

2008-12-14T23:05:00.000-08:00

In another cool thing that happened to me recently, you can now watch some of the videos I recorded on your iPod. I think all of them should be available at some point, but they just started with some of the more popular ones.

Mine's the "Creating SWC files."

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=299639895

Googling "Typical Dinner"

2008-12-14T22:51:00.000-08:00

I analyze my logs every once in a while to see who visits my different blogs, and I was surprised when someone found my site googling the term "typical dinner." I was more surprised when I googled this term and found out I was the number one listing.

This could be one of my greatest accomplishments, or it just goes to show you how bad Google is on some worthless search terms because I know no one really links to this blog :-)

Anyways, here's proof as I don't know how long it'll last:

High Roast Chicken

2008-11-25T23:46:00.000-08:00

I had never actually done one of the most basic cooking skills: roasting a chicken. Rather than go with the normal roasting method, I looked through one of my favorite recipes and decided to try a high roast chicken. In order to get the skin crispy (and keep the bird from overcooking), they recommend the high roast method by butterflying the bird.

Anyways, I brined the bird, then washed it and patted it dry very thoroughly.

I tried my best to butterfly the chicken (I now have a vague idea of what to do, though as you can see below I cut the wrong part by accident in the beginning).

The backbone is what's hanging out to the right. For the most part I used scissors to do the surgery.

Following the recipe, I used a broiler pan and cut up some potatoes to put underneath on the bottom to soak up some of the grease (and by grease, I mean great chicken flavor).

I spread some butter mixed with some herbs into the skin and then seasoned the outside with salt and pepper.

Roasting for a while on high heat, we got a nicely browned bird.

Which I proceeded to cut up into pieces (again, not a fantastic job) and serve.

The let's not forget about the potatoes, which were amazingly delicious.

Overall the bird was pretty juicy and the potatoes were really good, having received a lot of flavor from the chicken drippings. I just had roast chicken at a restaurant a few days ago, and I can say the one I made was much better.

It was a really easy recipe and also a really cheap dinner. It's definitely something I'd do again.

I think next time I may try the "Zuni" way of roasting a chicken, which is instead of brining it, you season it generously with a lot of salt and let it sit in the fridge for 1-3 days. This is similar to brining, but it also dries out the skin so it's pretty tasty and very crispy.

Southern Food: Boiler Peanuts and Fried Okra

2008-11-01T19:02:00.000-07:00

Boiled peanuts have recently been promoted to South Carolina's official snack food. More importantly, it's a snack food I really love, and a few weeks ago, when I was at a farmer's market, I decided to give them a try.

Having tried making them once a long time ago, and failing, I searched a lot online to make sure I was doing them right. Anyways, I used mostly water, salt, and some veggie broth. I threw the peanuts int here and let it boil for quite a while.

And after a while, it just kept boiling over and making quite a mess.

And they didn't get soft. So I kept boiling. In total, a ridiculous amount, like 16 hours. In the end, I just gave up. They didn't taste bad--they were just a little too hard.

So I kept asking around at work what I did wrong, and the answer, I finally got was that I was that I was boiling it at too high of a heat. So a week later, I tried it again, and instead of boiling it at a high heat for so long, I got it to a boil and then simmered at a low heat for a long time. It took about 6 hours to get the peanuts soft, which is about right according to the recipes, so the low heat must be the secret. And with that came great success as the boiled peanuts made a great snack.

Another food I've come to like more and more despite moving away from the South is okra. Usually it's in bhindi masala here, but in South Carolina, the way most people eat it is fried.

Looking up recipes online, I cut up the okra and threw it around in some corn meal and flour mixture. Then I threw it in the cast iron fryer.

The first batch was a little overcooked, but the second one was much better.

Overall it was pretty good. The bhindi masala that I eat around here seems like a better use for okra and is something I'll try next time. As far as fried okra is concerned, I'll try using an egg wash next time to give it a little thicker coating.

Looks Ma, I'm famous

2008-10-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I'm not that famous, but I did have the pleasure of getting video taped. It was a real life studio: green room, cameras and lights in my face, and a crew of people helping with the shoot. All in all, pretty intimidating. The videos aren't perfect as I was pretty nervous, and I really only had one shoot, but they came out pretty well. The videos are on creating SWCs, RSLs, and Modules.

You can find them in the "Flex in a Week" Training Videos, under Day 5.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/

There's also an Adobe Developer Center article for one of them. I'm not sure if the other will get posted there or not.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex_swc.html

Burger Joints

2008-10-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I guess I'm pretty snotty when it comes to burgers. Anytime I'm at a fast food joint, I hardly ever get a burger because they're usually not that good. But I've really got a bone to pick with the people out here. In-n-out sucks. I'm sorry, I don't know what people see in it. The burgers are tasteless and small, the texture of the fries is weird, and overall it sucks. The only thing going for them is the sauce they put on the burgers (and of course the oversized clothes pins), but I just don't think it's that good.

The reason I bring this up is because I went to DC this weekend and had some five guys again, and I gotta say, it's so much better than in-n-out. So good, in fact, that I would put it up there with other non-fast food burger joints (or even my own burgers). Their fries are also better, though, not quite as good as McDonald's. To you people who think in-n-out is the holy grail of fast food: yes, their ingredients may be fresh, but the food still sucks. Try five guys instead.

Eggs Benedict

2008-09-28T17:28:00.000-07:00

I hardly eat breakfast, but when I do on the weekends, it's pretty good. I've always loved pancakes and especially french toast. One of the more decadent breakfast dishes that I'd always heard about was eggs benedict. I had it on a cruise ship once and wasn't that impressed, but I had it at some amazing breakfast place around 54th and 9th in New York, and I was absolutely blown away--it was delicious. It's supposed to be a hard dish to make, so I decided to give it a try. It turns out it's actually not that bad, and it came out to be a delicious dish.

If you don't know what eggs benedicts is, it's an english muffin with canadian bacon, topped with a poached egg and hollondaise sauce. The recipe I followed was from the pioneer woman, one of my favorite blogs. Here's what it looks like:

I had trouble finding canadian bacon at first and kept looking in the sandwich meat section, which is where the bacon is in our grocery store, but canadian bacon, which has much less fat, was actually in the pork section with the meats.

I butterred the muffins and put it in the oven with the canadian bacon under the broiler.

Now poaching an eggs is supposed to be one of the hardest things, but I found it to actually be pretty easy. I just boiled some water in a pan, threw in some vinegar, swirled the pan around and dropped the egg in. The eggs I got were super-fresh from the farmer's market, so when I poached them all the whites stayed together.

I accidentally broke the yolk on one egg before putting it in the pot, but it still turned out pretty good.

For the sauce, I followed the blender recipe from pioneer woman. It amazes me how rich the sauce is. It's basically just egg yolks and butter. I also put a generous portion of cayenne pepper in there.

I tasted the sauce. I thought it was a little bland, but in the dish as a whole, it was quite good. I'm not sure if that means the sauce was messed up, or that's how hollandaise sauce is supposed to taste. Also, I ended up putting some ground pepper on top, but next time, I'll probably throw it into the sauce.

All the poached eggs turned out pretty well, except for the one where the yolk was broken. I was a little paranoid about undercooking it, and it was still a little runny when I cut into it. However, I think I'd like it a little more runny next time, though. The problem is that when cooking a poached egg, the yolk will still feel jiggly even if it's cooked pretty thoroughly.

I think the canadian bacon was a little dry, so next time I'll take it off a little earlier since the english muffins seem to take a little longer.

Here's everything assembled. Definitely pretty easy, especially given it's reputation, and it's definitely one of my favorite breakfast dishes.

Homemade Pizza

2008-09-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

One thing I've wanted to do for a while was make some pizza from scratch. One of my friends bought be a pizza stone as a gift, and I've used it to make naan and a few other things, but hadn't used it to make pizza yet.

The recipes I followed were from my favorite cookbook, America's best recipe. I made a pretty simple dough, kneaded it, and let it rest for 2 hours.

I decided to also make some pizza sauce. I just took a can of diced tomatoes and a can of tomatoe sauce and threw a few spices in it, while letting it simmer for 10 minutes or so.

For the toppings, I went with some sauteed mushrooms and onions. Since it was going into the oven, I made sure not to overcook them.

And I really sucked at rolling the dough; however, Jono has sent taught me (atleast theoretically taught me) how to throw the dough, so I'll have to try it out again. I don't have a rolling pin, so my basic strategy was to just use my hands and smash it out. Then I'd pick it up and stretch it. And just keep repeating, covering any holes I accidentally made.

After the sauce, I put on th toppings and then I put on some fresh mozerella that I bought and cut up.

I had some serious trouble sliding the pizza on to the pizza stone. My pizza stone smokes like no other and burns my eyes quite a bit. After this experience, I looked up what to do, and I left the pizza stone in while I self-cleaned my oven. It smoked a lot, but doesn't seem to smoke anymore. I think the problem was that we had baked cookies on the pizza stone once. But the cookies have too much oil, and the oil soaks into the porrous stone, and a 500 degree oven goes pretty far above most oil's smoking point.

Anyways. I baked it for about 12 minutes. It's pretty easy to tell when pizza's done, so I took it out after the cheese started browning.

Although the pizza didn't look perfect, it still tasted good.

The pizza was good. I liked it better than most pizza chains, but it wasn't quite as good as some of the places in the city, especially Little Star, which i know is a different type of pizza, but it's just so damned good. This pizza definitely could've used a little more flavor (maybe in the sauce or with more flavorful toppings like sausage). Pizza was a relatively easy dish to make, and now that I have the dough made and frozen, it'll be easy to just make it and pop it into the oven.

Iron Chef Competition

2008-09-06T22:20:00.000-07:00

For labor day, we decided to throw an iron chef competition. It was a pain organizing, but luckily Siva took the lead and organized everything. Basically we split up into two teams, team soy sauce (all asians) and team honkie (non-asian).

At 2 PM our secret ingredient was announced, and we were given 4 hours to plan, shop, and cook. Much to my surprise, our three judges chose beer as the secret ingridient. I had thought of a few different secret ingridients and beer was not one that came to my mind. So we started thinking through the first items that come to mind when we think of beer: cheese fondue, beer bread, beer chicken (a whole chicken cooked on the grill with a beer up its ass), beer batterred shrimp/chicken. The problem we kept running into was beer was always in the food, but it was never a prominent part that came through in taste.

At any rate, after looking up recipes in some books and online, we settled on a few of them, substituting beer for as many things as well could.

First up was beer, garlic soup. To make it more gimmicky, we served the soup in a cup and made some foam by beating some egg whites. The soup was mostly made with beef broth, beer, garlic, and some other spices.

I tried some, and it was definitely unique. The presentation was pretty awesome, but I don't think the taste was there. The judges seemed to agree with this :-) I think the garlic wasn't sauteed enough before the broth was thrown in, so the soup had a little bitter taste from the uncooked garlic.

To go with the soup, we decided to serve some beer, onion bread.

This was something I made, and I think it turned out really well. The texture was a little chewy compared to professional breads, but it tasted quite good.

For the entree, we decided to cook some champagne shrimp pasta. Basically we were struggling to come up with a good entree that captured beer flavor. I feel that beer can chicken and beer battered chicken (or shrimp) don't really catch much flavor form the beer. They definitely taste good, but I've always felt it's not much beer flavor (after tasting beer battered apple crisps, I think I feel a little differently because I did taste the beer, but anyways, this was my logic at the time). A long time ago, I had cooked some champagne shrimp pasta. So we decided to replace the champagne the recipe called for with "the champagne of beer", miller high life.

Overall the dish turned out pretty well. The shrimp was cooked in beer and the sauce was basically all beer and some heavy cream. Despite all this, the beer flavor was pretty weak--it's just hard to do.

There were some problems with the dish: notably, someone forgot to wash the parsley, and a judge noticed some crunchiness (i.e.-sand) in her entree. Also, one judge mentioned the pasta was a bit overcooked. I tasted the pasta and know it wasn't overcooked at first, but then I put the pasta in with the sauce and kept cooking it. Then I ended up reheating it twice for the judges, so because of that, it might've been cooked a little too long. Moreover, I totally forgot to top it with parmesean, gorund pepper, and red pepper flakes as I had planned to.

To serve with the entree, we made some country time lemonade (yeah, we're lazy), and poured htem half beer, half lemonade. I remember this drink being popular in Europe (I can't remember the name). The judges seemed to like it overall.

For dessert, we were made a guiness chocolate cake. Paul came up with a great idea of making bailey's irish creme frosting to acompany the cake, makign it a dessert irish car bomb. It was a great idea, but execution wasn't so good.

Everyone loved the cake, but I think Paul and Siva double salted the icing (i.e.-each of them put the salt in that the recipe called for). Unfortunately, no one tasted it until it reached the judges table. It's weird how an extra half teaspoon of salt can make so much of a difference.

Team asia cooked in Siva/Inbae's kitchen and then brought their food over to our place to serve to the judges.

Their first dish: crab and lobster stuffed mushrooms. For the sauce, they reduced beer and sweetened it a lot using brown sugar and some other techniques.

I liked the mushrooms. The sauce was a little too sweet for my tastes and didn't really complement the mushrooms too much.

The next course they had was beer marinated, roasted lamb with mashed potatoes and onions.

Ok, so I've got to admit, I don't really like lamb much. I like gyros and a few other lamb dishes, but I honestly don't like the taste that much. But this lamb was really good. It was cooked perfectly and quite tasty. The sides were good overall, not as good as the lamb, though.

For dessert, they fried up some beer, marinated apples and served it with ice cream and whipped cream.

I didn't get to taste any of the well cooked ones, but the "test ones" were pretty good. I was surprised I could taste the beer with the apple fritter. I'd imagine with the ice cream, it's be pretty good.

Overall the iron chef competition was a lot of fun. Unfortunately team asia was declared the victors. They had good execution, the lamb was amazing, and their presentation was outstanding. I think our food was more unique, the beer flavor a little stronger, but utlimately we had a few executation flaws that cost us the win.

If I had to do it over again, I'd probably replace the beer soup with a beer stew. I think the pasta would've been better if we did make those mistakes, but I might try something different instead of the pasta, but I still don't really have any great ideas for this one. The dessert was good--just too much salt in the icing. I'm sure we'll do it again, but probably not for another 6 months. In the meantime, I may push for a potluck competition, where one ingridient must be used.

Indian Food: Chana Masala

2008-09-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

The last time I tried to stretch myself and cook something unique, the Korean food turned out pretty bad, atleast in my opinion. However, I figure Indian food is in my reach, as I've seen Siva make it before. So I decided to start with a pretty simple dish, chana masala. It's basically just chickpeas in a stewed, spicy tomato sauce. To try something unique, I decided to try to make some homemade garlic naan as well.

The recipes I used were from http://www.manjulaskitchen.com/, which is a great website because it includes videos as well. So I followed the naan recipe and made the dough, which as you can see is quite sticky. I don't cook bread often enough, so I'm never sure how the bread dough should be, but I managed to oil up my hands enough and knead the dough.

I let it rest about 2 hours and then shaped the naan, brushing some butter on, and putting some garlic on top.

I put it in a hot oven on the pizza stone and took them out when they looked done. They looked really nice and tasted awesome, but it tasted more like garlic bread than garlic naan. I think it was mostly the texture, but I'll have to try it again and see what's going on--still good though.

For the naan, I cut up a lot of garlic and used my new garlic press, which is quite useful. You can see it all below. For the chana masala, I cut up some on red onions.

In a pan, I heated some oil, and threw in some cumin seeds. After a few minutes, I threw in some garlic, just a little bit, and sauteed it in. Finally I threw in the onions.

After the onions cooked I threw in a can of diced tomatoes to cook down for a while.

While this was cooking, I made some sauce. I threw in a can of diced tomatoes, some chopped jalepenos, and some ginger paste into a blender. I almost never use jalapenos, but I learned that a) jalapenos can be pretty hot b) never ever touch your face or eyes after cutting a pepper without cleaning your hands very, very thoroughly.

After the tomatoes broke down, I threw in the sauce from the blender and half a can or so of tomato sauce to make it a little more liquidy. Then I threw in some indian spices, which I don't really recal at the moment, and finally the chickpeas. I went to an Indian supermarket to buy all the spices, and I gotta admit that spices there were sooo much cheaper than at a regular supermarket. It was about 20% the price. However, it's all in bags, and I need to get some jars to store all of it rather than regular tuperware, which is what I'm using now. Also, for the chickpeas, I soaked it for about 2 hours in water with some tea bags to give them a little better color.

I let this all stew for a while and voila.

Overall the Indian food was quite good. I'd consider it a relatively easy dish to make as well. Even the naan wasn't too hard, and I definitely want to try that again as I can't tell if I screwed something up or the recipe isn't that good because it definitely looks like naan. At any rate, it all tasted quite good and would be something I'd expect from an indian restaurant.

Smoking Pork Butts

2008-08-17T21:37:00.000-07:00

Duke's bbq is my favorite restaurant back home and one of the few things I actually crave. Last time I tried making pulled pork, I used a crock pot, and it came out well, but was super moist. Now that we've moved and have a grill, I decided it was time to try doing it a more old-fashioned way, smoking the pork shoulder. To celebrate the occassion and to help eat the massive amount of pork, I started inviting people over and just kept mentioning it to other. Somehow, we ended up with an unexpected party of about 18 people.

I went to the local butcher and got a nice 8.5 lb Boston Butt. The night before, I made a pretty typical spice rub and slathered it all over.

I sealed this puppy in some plastic wrap and let it sit overnight.

I'm lucky to have a job that let's me work remotely, and since Wednesday is the unofficial day to work from home, I decided to do just that because I'd rather hog the communal grill all day on Wednesday rather than Sunday. So I woke up quite early and got the grill ready.

So I'll go ahead and complain about our grill now, but I don't really plan on using it much. The main reason is I swear it catches on fire too much because it hasn't been cleaned in god knows how long. There's just too much gunk at the bottom and cleaning off the grates is not enough. This meant I had to keep a close eye on it, so nothing would catch on fire for too long. I say too long because there were a few fires.

Once the meat caught on fire; however, I'll take responsibility for this one as I was just starting out and forgot to turn the burner directly under the meat off. That one halted pretty quickly once I turned the burner off. However, the main problem was with the wood chips. I don't know if anyone else has tried to smoke, especially on a gunky gas grill, but every once in a while the woodchips would stop just smoking and start burning.

The basic setup: keep the burners on the right on, put the woodchips that I had soaked in water on top of those burners in a throwaway aluminum pan, and put the meat over to the left so there was no direct heat under it.

Sometimes the smoking did work really well. To make sure it made it all the way over to the meat, I tried to cover a lot of the extra vents in the grill with tinfoil. I was also a little paranoid about it drying out, so I made a "mop." Basically I took some cider vinegar and apple juice and slathered it on the meat generously every once in a while.

I debated just letting the woodchips burn, as I figured it wasn't that big of a deal, but being my first time and trying not to get in trouble with the home-owners association, I decided to stay out there and watch it closely. Anytime the wood caught on fire, I'd throw some water on it so it didn't get out of hand.

Overall it worked pretty well, and I tried to keep the temperature around 250 degrees while making sure to keep the fires under control. After about 5 hours of smoking, around 1 PM, the fire went out for no reason, and I gave up lighting it, so I wrapped it in tinfoil and moved the cooking in the oven. Coking in the oven's a lot easier as I can just set it (at 275 degrees) and let it cook without worrying about fires.

I read so many different tutorials on how to smoke a pork shoulder, and I watched about 5 different videos on it. Everyone had a different opinion on when to take out the pork. Numbers ranged from 160 to 210. I decided to go for around 190-195, which seemed to be somewhere in the middle. After I took it out, I let it rest for about 2 hours while I waited for dinner time to arrive and to make the other dishes (macaroni and cheese, and cornbread).

When I took it out, it was falling apart, and I couldn't even move it to another tray in one piece.

Apparently smoking it causes the outside to be black. I wanted it to be a little smokier and crunchier on the outside, but it still turned out really well--perfectly moist. The crockpot one was too juicy; this one was much better.

For the sauce, I obviously used the Duke's bbq sauce, which is my idea of heaven in a bottle, but also I decided to make a Mojo sauce (basically citrus + garlic).

For the sides, I made some cornbread, following Alton Brown's recipe. It turned out decent. Personally I like the corn bread a little more moist and with some more flavor (maybe sweeter or with some jalapenos).

I also made some Mac and Cheese. I looked around for some recipes and settled on a Martha Stewart one that seemed to get great reviews.

Because more people were showing up than I originally planned, I multiplied the recipe by 50%. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough sharp cheddar, so I used some extra gruyere (recipe called for gruyere and sharp cheddar). Personally, I didn't like the gruyere and adding more was a mistake. I should've just made sure to keep the ratios between the cheeses proportional. Other, more hardcore mac-n-cheese fans, seemed to like the dish, though. Rather than make my own breadcrumbs, I decided to use panko breadcrumbs. This turned out well, but I think I'll add some butter next time to make sure they get nice and brown on top.

Overall the party turned out really well. Because I only made 3 dishes it was a relatively easy dinner even though we were serving 18. It's a lot easier just making 3 big dishes.

Also, I was shocked at how close I was to estimating everyone's appetite. There was just a really small amount of food left. However, I decided to make some pulled pork because I was just really in the mood for some. Pulled pork always seems to freeze really well, and I was looking forward to leftovers. Sadly , I didn't get any of those, but everyone had a good time and enjoyed the food, so I can't complain too much.

The make-shift party ended up being a success. I guess it was kinda an unoffical housewarming party, just with less people and a dirtier house :-) I'm still waiting to throw a real housewarming party, as I didn't invite everyone, but I need to cleanup some more and hopefully get a pot rack to clear up some kitchen space. I'm also not really sure what to do for the party (just h'oure d'oeuvres perhaps or perhaps a Beaufort boil). If anyone has suggestions, let me know. Also, if anyone's smoked a pork butt before and has some pointers for some of my problems, throw a comment at me.

Typical Dinner

2008-08-12T00:14:00.000-07:00

So as we're getting back into cooking around the new apartment, I'm back to cooking a pretty typical dinner for me. Basically it consists of chicken, rice, and some veggies. We've been in a smoothie kick of late and had some yogurt lying around, so I decided to try to make yogurt chicken. It's essentially breaded chicken, but instead of a butter or egg wash, it uses yogurt with some lemon.

The recipe I used was http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Yogurt-Chicken/Detail.aspx . I then cooked some rice-a-roni and veggies with some butter and garlic salt. Everything turned out pretty well. I decided to cook the chicken on a cooling rack based on a commenter's recommendation so it wouldn't cook in any of the fat. The chicken came out well, but the rack was a bitch to clean. I let it soak for a while and tried my best. Sticking it in the dishwasher seemed to do the trick and get everything out.

Double Chocolate Cake

2008-08-12T00:02:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning out some photos, and I found some from a really delicious cake I made. This was for my 1 year anniversary at Adobe (woohoo!). After making red velvet cakes and cupcakes, I decided to go with something much more typical, so I looked for a particularly sinful recipe, which I found from epicurious: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/DOUBLE-CHOCOLATE-LAYER-CAKE-101275

Here are all the ingredients in the recipe. I stole some coffee from work that day since I'm way too lazy to make my own. One thing I did find out when I made this was just how expensive the ingredients are, especially the chocolate.

Here are the two layers after baking. The recipe called for 10 inch pans, but unfortunately, all I have are 9 inch pans. These puppies barely fit and one spilled over just a teensy bit. I haven't made many layer cakes, but I've found they never come out perfectly circular and the top is always bigger than the bottom, so I end up doing some trimming (and still have a somewhat lopsided cake).

Unfortunately, this is where the photos stop. The end result was amazing. I recommend refrigerating the icing before trying to ice the cake because mien end up dripping a little bit. It still covered everything and stayed put, but there ended up being some extra goop down at the bottom.

Grilling 101

2008-08-03T22:46:00.000-07:00

So two months have passed, and I haven't blogged here. I'll try to do better :-)

I've noticed I motivated a friend of mine to start blogging about food, but from the look of his blog he actually knows what he's talking about. He's doing a much better job posting than I am as well. Check out HungryKyle.

One of my excuses is that I moved to a new apartment near Alamo Square (near the Full House houses). Once we get a pot rack, and I get some stuff for my room, like a bookshelf, I'll take some pics and post them up(so like 2 more months).

So I've got no photos about food, but I do want to tell some things I've learned about cooking.

So I really love a good steak. I've been to a few expensive restaurants, and the only one I'd really consider going back to is Bobo's steakhouse because it was probably the best steak I've ever had. I'm sure I'll go back and realize it was a fluke experience, but for now, I consider it the best steakhouse in the SF.

I had been bummed before about being in an apartment and having to cook steaks inside, but I started cooking and experimenting with different ways to do it, and now, I can honestly say I like cooking them indoors more than outdoors (and we have a communal grill at our new apartment). I watched Alton Brown cook steaks inside once, and after trying his method, I'll never go back to anything else.

I like a good, peppery and well seasoned steak, so what I do is brush the steaks in a little vegetable oil, and then I use a generous amount of Montreal Steak seasoning (kosher salt and black pepper works as well). I put a cast iron (really needs to be cast iron as regular stainless steel doesn't seem to work as well) in the oven for about 15-20 minutes at 500 degrees (or however hot the oven goes...mine goes to 550). Then I take it out and put it on the stove at high. I throw the steaks on for about 1 minute each side, and then I put it in the oven and cook for about 2 minutes each side for medium rare. You gotta let it rest for about 10 minutes after that. I always know how long to cook the steak when doing it indoors, and they come out absolutely perfect.

I also learned how to make an amazing hamburger this weekend because I did a little more research online. Key things I really didn't know: you need about 20% fat for hamburger meat, and you don't want to squeeze the meat hard...you want to make the patty light and fluffy.

So I went to costco and got 12 lb's of beef. The problem was it was only 12% fat, so I threw in some butter to get it more moist and juicy. A few hours before cooking, I tossed in some garlic salt and some worstershire sauce. I was afraid the garlic salt would dry out the meat, but I didn't want to have to mix them at the bbq. It ended up being perfectly fine, but I'm not sure if it's really recommended to salt a lot before cooking meat. Anyways, the other thing about hamburgers is you should only flip them once, or they might fall apart on the grill, especially since the patties aren't particularly dense. It takes only about 4 or 5 minutes on each side to cook them.

The burgers came out absolutely perfect. Inbae had some spinach and grilled onions with balsamic vinegar. He also made some homemade bbq sauce, but what I really loved on the burger was some garlic aioli sauce I made. Garlic aioli is essentially garlic mayo, and it's absolutely delicious. The recipe I followed was one from Emeril. I didn't really like the way it came out initially (I realized after the fact that our olive oil might actually be going rancid because it's gotten too much sunlight). To doctor it up, I threw in some dijon mustard, extra lemon juice, some cayenne pepper, and some garlic powder. Our kitchen wreaked of garlic, but the sauce was delicious. I don't think I've ever had anyone ask for the recipe for a hamburger before, and this time atleast 3 people asked me how I did it. Christine even asked for some extra raw meat and sauce to take home, so she could make it herself.

One problem I've had at bbq's before was when I tried making chicken, I felt the marinade made the chicken juicy but didn't add much flavor. However, Inbae made jerk chicken, and I think it was the right move. He used a recipe I sent him off of epicurious, which is one of my favorite food websites because their recipes are top-notch. Anyways, the chicken was probably the best grilled chicken I've had in a really, really long time. The food at the bbq this weekend was just all-around fantastic.

Anyways, I hope to start taking more photos of the food, and I'll try to post here a little more frequently :)

Cinco De Mayo: Mexican Hot Dogs

2008-05-19T18:55:00.000-07:00

To celebrate Cinco de Mayo (yes I'm way behind on posts, but this one actually catches me up...so now it's time to cook more), I had some people over to eat some mexican hot dogs. What are mexican hot dogs? Well, I thought it might only be a San Francisco thing, but googling mexican hot dogs does indeed seem to bring up the same food. Basically it's your typical hot dog wrapped in bacon. To complement the dish, I also made some stuffed potatoes. Since we're already using bacon, I decided to go for a ranch based potato recipe.

To bake the spuds a little quicker, we can use the microwave to help us out. In order to stick it in the microwave, make sure the puncture holes in the potatoes, otherwise I'm told they might explode.

For both the potatoes and the hot dogs, we're going to need some sauteed onions.

My eyes were feeling particularly sensitive that day, and I had to walk away 3 times while cutting these.

Now after 15 minutes in the microwave, put them in the oven for 15 minutes so they're a little crispy.

In the meantime, we'll saute the onions. Just having watched Paula Dean, I decided to go with the butter approach...and a pretty good amount.

Saute until a little translucent.

Take the potatoes out of the oven and chop off the top.

Take out all that starchy filling, being as careful as you can to leave the skin in-tact.

You can see I didn't do the greatest job here as one of mine is a little sloppy.

Take the potato and mash it together. Even though the recipe didn't call for it, I decided to add a little butter.

I also took some oil and coated the outside of the skins. Then I salted the skins with kosher salt.

I took some frozen broccoli, and since my friends don't like veggies that much, I put less than the recommended amount.

With half of the sauteed onions from before.

The heart of this recipe is the ranch dressing. Because it requires half a cup, I decided to go with the fat free version. I should probably try to taste test the two, but the fat free seems to be good enough for me.

Mix it all together

And stuff them as high as you can. Anytime I stuff potatoes or mushrooms or anything else, I never know what to do with the leftover stuffing...

Anyways, put them in the oven for another 15 minutes or so.

The main ingredients for the mexican hot dogs: hot dogs and bacon. I really like the Hebrew national hot dogs, plus I'm supporting my own brethren. The motto always cracks me up to: "Hebrew Nationao. We Answer to a Higher Authority"

One slice of bacon seems to fit perfectly around the hot dog.

Then just stick them in the pan. No oil's needed since bacon emits so much grease.

Anytime I deal with bacon, I'm usually disgusted with myself afterwards, and I make sure to pat it down with paper towels to get rid of some of the grease.

And here's the final product:

The hot dogs were good. Not quite as good as a drunk mexican hot dog from the vendors in the Mission district, but what is? As for the potatoes, they were pretty good--a little bland IMO, but the others seemed to like them a lot.

Trip to Pittsburgh, Ebay's Birthday Party

2008-05-06T22:13:00.000-07:00

I went to Pittsburgh for spring carnival. It was awesome going back, seeing everyone, and eating the food that I missed. I still hold that Korea Garden in Pittsburgh has some of the best Korean food in America. You'd think it'd be easy to find a replacement in SF, but I haven't been able to so far.

Anyways, while we were there, it happened to be Inbae's birthday. He's becoming an old man (and acting like one too). He turned 25 (26 in Korean age), so Christine and Angela came up with the idea of making his cake a quarter. So I baked a red velvet cake. This was my first cake, and I took it out about 10 times to check to see if it was cooked through, but it came out really, really well. No one seemed to know what a red velvet cake was (I guess it's a Southern thing) but everyone seemed to really like it, especially the frosting which was a mix of butter, cream cheese, and white chocolate. The recipe I used is here: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Red-Velvet-Cake-IV/Detail.aspx

Angela decorating the cake...

So I made the cake and icing. Angela and Christine assembled the cake and put the icing onit. I was pretty incredulous of how it'd turn out, but after 2 hours of hard labor, I can say they did an awesome job with the cake. One mistake you can see above is putting on the candles before finishing the cake completely...juts silly.

As you can tell it looks awesome so far.

Last finishing touches. You can see all the attempted drawings of ebay's big head on the paper.

Just awesome

Jay and Christine lighting all 25 candles.

Ebay's so happy.

Drawn to actual proportion.

And ebay became even tastier...

Playing with his girlfriend's hair???

The cake: so red, so delicious. Annlouise would be proud.

This is a really good party dish. It's lil smokies and some secret sauce. If you don't know the sauce, you'll love the dish. If you do, you'll question my sanity (recipe's actually from my mom and who knows where she got it from). At any rate, I guarentee most people like it.

Basically you take a package of lil' smokies. Put them in a bowl of water and into the microwave for about 4 minutes. Then drain the water to remove some of the excess fat. Now to make the sauce take about 1/2 a bottle of grape jelly and 1/3 a bottle of yellow mustard. Put it in a pan on medium high and cook for a few minutes. Put in the little smokies and adjust the sauce as you see fit.

I know the sauce sounds disgusting, but it's really friggin' good.

A pic of all the asian party goers.

Party was pretty sweet. I was in a rush, so I didn't take pics of me making the cake, but if you've neve rmade one, the red velvet cake recipe I used is super simple, and it came out amazing. I'll try to make some other cake soon and take some pics along the way.

Fried Chicken

2008-05-04T11:26:00.000-07:00

There are a few goals I have in life. One of them is to be able to cook good fried chicken.

The chicken pieces. For skinless chicken breasts, I always get the costco brand and just freeze it. I tried it for thighs and drumsticks, but the meat just looks a little too bloody, so I probably won't get it anymore.

Decided to do a little marinade. I like fried chicken with a little spice, so besides the usual marinade of buttermilk, I looked up some dominican fried chicken recipes and decided to throw in some lime juice as well. Then of course garlic salt, cayenne pepper, and some korean pepper flakes.

Marinating away for about 24 hours.

For the egg wash, some eggs, baking soda, and baking powder. The baking soda/powder gives it a some fluff.

Some flour in a pan.

The seasonings I used: white pepper, paprika, and garlic powder. Just put it right in the flour.

Following America's Test Kitchen's advice, I used the double-dip approach: flour, egg, flour.

Need to roll it around and cover it fully.

Here's the first batch.

Repeat with the rest.

Now for the part, I'm still struggling with. The only other time I tried making fried chicken, I used vegetable shortening, which is a little disgusting. Again, following America's Test Kitchen, I decided to use peanut oil, which is a little harder to find in supermarkets.

Need to get it to about 375 to start.

Put the chicken in.

Me checking the temperature of the oil. I cooked it for about 10-15 minutes on each side. I think a big problem with cooking the chicken was that the temperature of the oil dropped significantly when I put the chicken in, and it took a while to get back up to 325/350 range.

Since I had to do it in batches, I put the finished ones in the oven on a very low heat, 200 degrees to keep it warm.

Along with the fried chicken, I made some mashed potatoes. Since I don't really like anything bland, I put some horseradish and scallions in them.

I was a little paranoid, so some chicken came out a little overcooked. I'd like to blame this on the oil temperature, though. I've already purchased a cast iron so I can see if that helps for next time. It was relatively cheap, like $20.

And the people who have to put up with my cooking. I dunno why, but the photo just amuses me.

Making Soft Pretzels

2008-04-06T22:53:00.001-07:00

So back when I was younger, I used to go through snack food phases. Once it was ice cream, another time popcorn, and one time it was soft pretzels. Not really healthy habits, but oh well. I decided I wanted to try baking more, and I heard pretzels are an easy start, so I went to allrecipes.com and looked up an easy recipe.

Here's the outcome:

Start off with a packet of yeast, some brown sugar, and a little bit of salt.

Mix it together with some warm water.

Now add a few cups of all purpose unbleached flour and some bread flour.

Then knead it together for about 8 minutes until you get a nice smooth consistency.

Take out the vegetable oil and coat a bowl with it. Put the dough in there and make sure it's coated in the oil before putting a lid on it.

This takes about 2 hours to rise. In the meantime, I mixed some warm water and baking soda. Before we put the pretzels in the oven, we'll dip it in this mixture which will help it rise a little more.

This is the dough after 2 hours. It's about twice as big.

I then split it into 12 pieces.

Working on the first half, I rolled them up.

And made my pretzel shape. At some point, I realized this isn't the actual pretzel shape as I need a spiral in the center, but I realized that during my second batch.

Dip them in the baking soda mixture and then put them on the baking sheet.

Let them rest another 15 minutes so they'll rise up.

And then put them in the oven and bake for about 10 minutes.

And voila.

So I melted some butter to coat the pretzels with, and then I put the toppings on. For the toppings I decided to try kosher salt (not quite as big as the real pretzel salt), a mix of cinnamon and sugar, and some garlic salt (with some marinara sauce).

Overall the pretzels were quite good. One thing that bothered me a bit was that they were a little crunchy on the bottom. This was just because the bottom of the pan got hot, and I don't really know what to do to solve this. Next time I think I'll try making some thicker pretzels to see if that helps.

The best topping was the garlic salt and marinara sauce. I think the pretzels just made damn good bread sticks and weren't as much of a soft pretzel as I hoped.

New York City Food

2008-03-26T21:39:00.000-07:00

So I'm back from NYC, and it was awesome seeing all of my friends. It made me miss NYC because there's just so much to do and so much good, cheap food to be had. It's really awesome when you look on yelp and see multiple 4 star restaurants within a block or two of where you're standing.

The places we went to eat were awesome. So delicious you can't imagine. The halal food cart is just amazing...amazing. I did a slack ass job of taking photos, but here are some:

Chiedo and I took the free Staten Island ferry which offers great views of the NYC skyline, the statue of liberty, and ellis island. One weird thing is I got linked to by some other blog. I noticed this because I usually get like 2-3 visitors a day and then one day I got 50, and I was wondering why the hell this happened. The blog doesn't really have his facts straight (I've been to NYC before and my list of things to do in NYC was in no-way ranked), but I'm flattered I got linked to. And he's right about the staten island ferry -- I think it's a great tourist destination.

One of my friends, Jaun, took us to this place way back in the day. It's a great Latino fried chicken place located in Harlem (157th and Broadway).

We brought some back for our gracious hosts, and they fought over the chicken like little kids.

Ummm...delicious. I plan on trying fried chicken again soon. maybe marinating in lime and some spices first. I just wish I could find a resonably sized container of peanut oil to use (not too big and not too small and expensive).

Another great place we went to is Lombardis. The waits a little long, but totally worth it. it's awesome pizza.

This is one of Chiedo's many failed attempts at trying to create a cool new profile picture for Facebook.

And a close-up of the real-deal.

All right, so it was a great trip overall. I got to hang out with a shit ton of friends from back in the day, and we had a good time.

I have some good stories about the halal food cart. The first night, we order, and I want both white and red sauce, but I'd never put it on myself (they've always done it for me at "my" place). So I decide to put equal amounts of white and red (and a lot of both). I go up to the guy to ask for a lid, and he gives me a crazy look. He asks me if I've ever had this hotsauce before. Well I have, but it's been a while. I took a bite of this shit, and I was trying to suck in cold air the whole way home. When I got there I tried water, milk, and whatever I could get my hands on, but it didn't help much. It was so delicious though, and I had trouble stopping. In the end, I only ate about half of it, and gave the rest to my Korean friend who finished it off without a drop of water....

The second night we go to halal food cart, as soon as we pull up there's some gang fight going on. One guys getting beat up in the corner, people are holding others back, etc... It cools down for like a minute and all seems quiet and then all of a sudden this red SUV squeals up, and starts trying to run over the other people. They're like running around trying to get out of the way. All the while the 30+ of us waiting in line are just standing there watching, chuckling a little (but really scared), wondering wtf is going on. The driver didn't hit anyone and then sped off as the other people tried to chase him down. The security guards in the building are on the radio, wondering what's going on outside. I assumed police would be there in a little bit, and I finally see a car show up, but all that happens is he skips the line, pays the man, and grabs his food...where are the police when some maniac is trying to runover people on the sidewalk?? Oh well. All in all, a pretty exciting night by the halal cart.

Anyways, NYC was awesome. Weather wasn't fantastic, but I'm sure I'll be going back.

New York City Cookies

2008-03-18T22:45:00.000-07:00

I'm off to the big apple. Leaving tomorrow on a red-eye flight and arriving Thursday early in the morning. I'll be there through the weekend and then go to my grandmother's Monday and Tuesday before heading back to SFO. So if you live in NYC gimme a call so we can get together.

If you have suggestions of what to do in NYC, let me know. I'm mostly going to meet up with some friends and party a lot, but another friend from SF is coming with me, and he's never been to NYC. The list so far is:

Staten Island Ferry
See Empire State Building
See WTC
Eat at Katz Deli
Eat at Lombardis
Get some Halal food
See little italy/chinatown
Eat at Daisy May BBQ (maybe)
See a Broadway Play (maybe)
Go to MOMA (maybe)

In planning to go to NYC, I decided to make some cookies--a lot of cookies. Over 100 in fact.

Perhaps this makes me a little crazy, I dunno. I stayed up till 2 am making them though. I brought some into work, but the majority are coming to NYC (hopefully they won't get crushed on the trip).

What types did I make? Regular chocolate chip, chocolate chip with some white chocolate, peanut butter and chocolate chip, and oatmeal raisin cookies.

What went in:

7.5 cups of flour
8 sticks of butter
8 cups of sugar
10 eggs
4.5 cups of chocolate chips
1 jar of peanut butter
1 jar of peanuts
3 cups of old-fashioned oats
1.5 cups of raisins

So if you're in NYC, come get some cookies from me.

The oatmeal raisin cookies. It's more fun to make big ones (and actually easier to cook).

Nice and big chocolate chip ones.

In total 8 plates of cookies....as I said, I'm a little crazy at times. Putting them on 8 plates helped them cool, but it also just screamed of excess, which is what I was going for.

And ready to be shipped. The stuff on the far right went to work. The rest will be in NYC.

Some lessons learned while cooking:

Peanut butter cookies are hard to bake. You need to make sure to undercook them (golden brown on only the sides). The first batch of peanut butter ones are a tad burned on the bottom.
Burning the bottoms of cookies can be helped a lot if you have a dark, thick baking sheet, and if you use the lower-middle and upper baking racks (flipping them half-way through). I need to go buy some better baking pans (only have 1 really good one).
Despite not eating many cookies, I have very little desire to eat any at this point after spending so long baking them.

Hopefully see you all in New York!

Dosa

2008-03-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

So when I normally get Indian food, it means North Indian cuisine. Every once in a while, I'll venture over to the South, and it's usually good, but nothing too impressive. However, I went to a place in San Francisco called Dosa (around 21st and Valencia), and I can say it was one of the best meals I've had in SF.

We tried a few things, but the two things that stick out to me (and I'll be going back for more) are the bhel puri and the pani puri.

Pani puri's essentially a fried hollow crisp that you put some fillings inside of and then you put some tamarin sauce and then some green, watery hot sauce (yeah, I don't actually remember what it's all called). Here's a similar pic:

All I can say is that the sauces were amazing. I don't use this phrase often, but it was definitely a "party in my mouth"

The other oh-so delicious dish was bhel puri. It's essentially just fried crisp, diced green mango, potatoes, tomatoes, onions & coriander. Again, quite good.

So this place has definitely moved up to the tops in my list. Pani puri also has risen as a favorite food of mine.

New Phone

2008-03-16T22:25:00.000-07:00

One of the more exciting things to happen to me recently was that we shipped Flex 3, the product I work on. When we shipped Flex 2 last year, the shipping gift was a nice Timbuktu bag. Since that time, Flex has become a baller product and a cornerstone of the platform that Adobe is pushing, so our shipping gift this year was also improved.

I don't really consider myself that geeky or high up on the technology curve. Yes, I do read computer books in my leisure time, and I do think about programming and software engineering a lot, but I'm not really a big sci-fi person or a bit gadget person. However, the usefulness of an iPhone cannot be denied, and it was honestly one of the few things that I really wanted. However, too cheap to buy it (especially given my Verizon contract), I was really ecstatic when we were given iPhones as our shipping gift.

So far, I have to say the iPhone is extremely useful, and it was an awesome shipping gift. I still have my old number since it's only $10 a month to add myself to my parent's family plan, but I'll be slowly transitioning over to my new phone, so please start to use this one.

Cashew Nut Chicken

2008-03-16T22:04:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite places to eat in Pittsburgh is Bankok Balcony in Squirrel Hill. Perhaps the main reason I love it so much is because their cashew nut chicken is so damned good. I haven't figured out what makes their sauce so damned good, but it's something I've always wanted to try to make. So here's my first attempt:

We almost always have some frozen chicken from Costco in our freezer. It's the simplest thing to work with since it's already in packet form. Just take it out the night before and put it in the fridge.

Cubed into about 1/2 inch pieces.

The veggies I decided to put in are onions and a red bell pepper.

Just chop off the top and then take out the insides.

Now we can start slicing it into smaller pieces.

Repeat with the onion.

For the sauce, we also need some diced garlic. I took one big clove out.

We're actually going to have two sauces. One to marinate and cook the chicken in, and another to cook everything in at the end.

For the chicken, here are the main ingredients.

We only need the egg white. If you haven't split an egg into the yolk and white part before, it's pretty easy. Just crack it open and transfer the yolk back and forth between the two halves.

With our sauce and that minced garlic from before.

After mixing.

We then let the chicken marinate in it while we prepare the other sauce.

For this sauce, we start with sesame oil, corn starch, chicken broth, rice vinegar (ok, I didn't have any...), and chili-garlic sauce.

I put a little less chili garlic paste, since I didn't want it to be too spicy, atleast initially.

Taking some vegetable oil, we cook the veggies for about 5 minutes, until the onions are translucent.

Now it's time for the chicken. Just pout it in with the sauce and cook for about 6 minutes.

Add the veggies back in.

Pour on the sauce. I thought it was a little too spicy, so I decided to mellow it out with some OJ.

Et voila.

I poured it over some rice and sprinkled some cashew nuts on top.

Overall it was a good stir-fry. It definitely wasn't the sauce from Bangkok Balcony but still tasty none-the-less. This will be a dish I will try to make again. Since I made the sauce myself (with a little bottled help), I know what went into it. I'll have to figure out the right combination of ingredients to match the Pittsburgh treat.

BBQ Throwdown

2008-03-16T21:24:00.000-07:00

When I go home to South Carolina, there are a few places I'll probably eat at, but there's only one place I must eat at--Duke's Barbeque. It's Southern food at it's best.

In the spirit of Bobby Flay, I had a bbq (pulled pork) throwdown with another Adobe employee, Joann, who's from Texas. We went to split a Boston Butt (Pork Shoulder) from Costco, got our respective sauces flown in from our states, and went to cooking.

I just put mine in a Crockpot overnight for about 10 hours on low with a little bit of water. In the morning I took it out.

I then shredded it up and put it back in the crockpot.

And the piece da resistance.

I just poured some sauce in and let it all simmer for another 2 or 3 hours on low in the crockpot.

During the "throwdown" we took an informal vote, and it came out about 50/50. It's hard to beat the real-deal from South Carolina. This one was a tad too moist in my opinion, and that came from cooking it in the crockpot versus a smoker or even the oven. However, I have to say the bbq definitely hit the spot, and I had a great time at the party.

Bobo's Steak

2008-03-03T20:48:00.000-08:00

I've had a lot of steaks in my life. I've eaten them at many different places. I've gotten it at a few fancy restaurants before, and I've nearly always concluded that these steaks are no better than the ones I cook at home. In some cases, I find it even worse (esp. for the money). Before this night, I had concluded the only slab of meal you can't cook at home that is worth getting in a restaurant is the prime rib, which is really hard to cook well at home (though I plan on trying it at some point).

However, last week, I had a steak at Bobo's, and I have to say it was the best meal I've had in San Francisco. The steak was absolutely amazing. When I dream about what a slab of beef tastes like -- this was it.

Boboquivari's is a fancy steak restaurant in the Marina district in San Francisco. My favorite cut of meat is a Ribeye, but they didn't have that, so I was stuck deciding between a bone-in New York Strip or a bone-in Filet Mignon. I chose the former, and I'm glad I did. The filet was a little more tender, but the flavor of the new york was out of this world.

So if you like steak and are in SF, summon the courage to splurge a little on a nice steak (this is the jew telling you that, so you know it's good). We definitely splurged when we went there and ended up spending $90 a person there. You don't have to spend that much to have a good meal, but there were some other good things we got. The crab, mussel, and shrimp platter we got as an appetizer was filled with butter and garlic and quite tasty. The sides were also pretty good, especially the onion rings. For dessert we had some cones with chocolate mousse in them -- another good choice. However, you're going for the steak, and you won't regret it.

At any rate, I definitely plan on trying some more steak places in the city, but I will no doubt be making a pilgrimage to Bobo's every once in a while. I just hope it'll be half as good as my first time.

My First Attempt at Korean

2008-02-26T23:06:00.000-08:00

My concentrated effort to become more asian has spilled over into the kitchen. Unfortunately, I was just as (un)successful in the kitchen as elsewhere.

Because of Inbae (my ex-roommate), Shen, Vicky, and many others in college, Korean has become one of my favorite types of food. I'm still a little picky about what I eat, but in general, I like a lot of their dishes.

When I was in Korea, Inbae's mom made Dak Jorim, a Korean chicken dish. Ebay's mom was happy to give me the recipe. Also, a typical Korean side-dish is Jap Chae, which is essentially stir fried vegetables with noodles. I don't like most Jap Chae I get (Brother's restaurant in SF is an exception), but I thought if I was making it, I could make it to my tastes.

Anyway, here's the outcome:

First, I'll show you how I made the jap chae, and then the dak jorim. Then, I'll tell you how it turned out (if you can't guess already). As a disclaimer, remember this is my first time cooking it, and I'm not exactly an expert cook, especially at asian cuisine.

So Jap Chae calls for some fancier mushrooms, so you usually just get them dehydrated and add some water. I got some shitake mushrooms.

I let them soak for a half hour (what the instructions said) in a bowl of room temperature water.

After a half hour, I took them out and put them on a paper towel. I don't know if it's shitakes in general or just dehydrated ones, but they really didn't smell too hot. The texture, after rehydrated, was also a little funny, but the taste wasn't too bad.

Here are the veggies I'm putting in the jap chae. I decided to put onions, spinach, carrots, mushrooms, green onions, and a bell pepper. I also added some diced garlic and egg as well.

One thing I learned from my sweet cookbook, Best Recipes, which is to use scissors to cut green onions. Actually using scissors when cooking is a pretty Korean thing and can come in quite handy. Note that I didn't use that cookbook for any of these recipes -- I just happened to pick up some helpful hints from it which I'm applying here.

Now for the carrots.

I wanted to make everything look really good, so I decided to julienne cut most of the vegetables. If you don't know what that is, it looks kinda like a shoestring. There are some great videos online on how to julienne a carrot, and I know I won't be doing it justice with these photos, but here's my attempt.

This is what the outcome will look like (it should be a little more uniform, but this was my first attempt):

First, I peeled the carrots. Since I am julienning it and squaring it off anyways, I don't know if there was a point to this. Next time I probably won't peel them, but I played it safe this time. I then cut them into a few smaller pieces.

I took each piece and tried to square off the edges. This makes it easier to cut because there's a flat side, but it's also part of the julienne process since we want rectangular cuts.

After squaring it off, I cut off some slices and stacked them up.

Then I cut them down again into little shoestrings. After it was all done, here's what I was left with:

Now for the bell pepper. Since I was on my julienne frenzy, I cut off the top and the bottom.

I opened it up, removed all the stuff from the inside, and cut it into nicer, more uniform slices.

I then just cut it down into slices.

The onions are up next. They're a little harder to julienne, so I just cut them up into some nice slices.

And here they are...

Mushrooms: into slices as well. They had a little weird texture when cutting, but it worked out fine.

Tada

Here are the majority of veggies for the jap chae.

We also need some diced garlic. Someone complained last time that I didn't explain all the steps in dicing garlic. Since this isn't a cooking show (b/c I'm no expert), I just arbitrarily decide what to show you guys. This time, I'll go into some more detail (though my photos leave a lot to be desired).

I also didn't know how to chop up garlic when I started and still find it a hassle. Anyways, here's the garlic:

The key is to take your knife and smash it down against the garlic. This lets you peel the skin right off. Since we're gonna dice it up anyway, don't go easy on the garlic and take out some aggression (it makes the skin easier to get rid of).

I usually use two hands when smashing, but one-hand was taking the photo, so this was as good as I could do.

Once you smash it, peel the skin, and then just dice away.

I decided to also add some egg to the jap chae. Since we want to slice it, we want it to be pretty. When I normally make scrambled eggs I shake and stir it around a lot. For this, though, I let them sit for a while to make sure it was flat.

Start with our eggs.

Crack them open.

Then oil the pan a little. I put some vegetable oil in and then used a paper towel to wipe up a lot of the excess. I'm not sure if this is necessary, but I saw someone do it when making tamago (egg used in sushi).

Pour the egg in.

Let it sit until some edges develop.

Once it looks like it's hardening up a bit, I cut it into smaller slices and moved them away from the center to pour any remaining goop into the center to cook with the rest of the egg.

Then I flipped it all over.

And there we are. Perfect for slicing.

Tada...

Now, for the noodles, I put up some water to boil.

These are my special Korean vermicelli noodles (thanks Joann). They're made of different stuff then the white people's vermicelli noodles.

After the water boils, I threw them in.

After about 7 minutes or so, they were ready. I took them out and drained them. However, unlike normal pasta, the directions also say to run cold water on top of them a few times and keep draining them after that (not sure why). At any rate, I put some cold water back in and drained it two times.

The jap chae recipe called for some toasted sesame seeds. I only had sesame seeds. I took about 2 teaspoons of those.

Too lazy to see if this was correct or not, I put them in a pan over low heat and kept shuffling them around. Perhaps you're supposed to toast them in an oven, but this is what I decided to do. In the end, I wasn't really sure if it was actually toasted, but it seemed about right :-)

A particularly asian cooking oil is sesame oil, and that's what this recipe called for.

I put about 2 tablespoons in the pan, heated it up a bit, and then put in the veggies. I left out the spinach and the egg because those can cook a little less.

Let it heat up for a while (about 5 minutes or so)

Add some salt.

And some pepper.

After it's done, I put some more sesame oil in (another 2 tablespoons).

Then I put in the noodles and the vegetables. I tried stirring it all around, but it didn't really work.

One step I added that was definitely necessary (and I didn't take a picture of), is I grabbed some scissors and cut the noddles up a bit. This made it a lot easier to stir and mix the veggies in with.

I also added the egg and some salt and pepper.

After a few minutes I put the veggies back in and then added some soy sauce. Since I like soy sauce (and usually not jap chae), I added a bit extra then the called for 1.5 tablespoons.

Now for our "toasted" sesame seeds.

And voila we are done. Personally i think it looks damned good.

Now for the chicken. I always use costco chicken because it's the easiest thing. I just go buy some packs from them. Then I just put the individual packs (which still have quite a lot in each one) and freeze them. Each of these packs contains 5 drumsticks that I had taken out a day or two before to let thaw in the refrigerator.

Here they are. I decided I would try taking the skin off some and leaving it on others to see if it made a difference. In the end I actually forgot about this so didn't run a taste test.

It seems weird to boil chicken, but that's what the recipe calls for, so I took out a pot and filled it with water.

Let it boil...

Now, in this step, I was supposed to start sticking the chicken in there, but it was at this point I realized my pot was too small. So I had to get a bigger one out and start the process over.

Pot #2:

Here we are...

Chicken goes in.

Let it boil. I'm told the point of this is to let it cook a bit and to remove some of the fat and gunk the chicken has.

As you can see, there's some nasty stuff on top. This was after about 10 minutes.

I took the chicken out and drained the water.

The sauce is made of garlic and soy sauce. You can also add some red pepper powder (which is what I did). First dice up the garlic -- same way as for the jap chae.

Here's our soy sauce (same as used in jap chae)

The recipe called for 8 tablespoons. Since I had a big pot, I decided to use about 12. Then I put the garlic in as well

Then some red pepper paste (as much as I feel like). Perhaps I'll try more next time.

And here we are.

Chicken goes in.

Then we fill it with water until the chicken is covered.

We also add 2 tablespoons of sugar.

Since we're trying to boil this water out, I think next time using less water (much less) is advised. I ended up spooning some of this delicious (or what should be delicious) sauce out of there so the chicken wouldn't end up overcooked.

Here it is boiling some.

I checked the chicken with my oh-so-handy thermometer to make sure it's cooked, and at 182, it definitely is.

Now that we're done, to thicken the sauce, we'll add some corn starch.

I took the corn starch and added it into the pot. I wasn't sure of the best way to add it in, so I just threw it on top and tried to stir/slosh it around to mix it in.

Here's what we end up with. It's a little clumpy (some of it's chicken pieces and some of it's clumps of corn starch).

After some more mixing and some more red pepper powder, we get this, which doesn't look half bad.

And here's the final plating:

So cooking Korean food was definitely an adventure. Personally, I didn't really like either of the dishes. The chicken was a little bland, and the jap chae just didn't taste good to me. But I normally don't like jap chae, so go figure. Other people who ate the food didn't seem as picky as me, though. Regardless, I still think the jap chae *looks* amazing, and that's gotta count for something...

Hopefully my next korean attempt will go better. If you've got suggestions/ways I can improve, lemme know.

Hearty Beef Stew

2008-02-18T20:56:00.000-08:00

I just got my crockpot this month. So I figured I would try making one of the easiest dishes: beef stew.

The main ingredient: chuck roast (about 3 lb's):

Cut into small pieces, large pieces of fat removed:

Pat it dry a little bit (not sure why, but that's what the recipe said...)

With a little salt and pepper:

Now we're going to brown the meat a little bit before putting it in the crock pot.

We just need it a little brown. I'm not sure if this is really necessary. Next time I might just try throwing it into the crockpot.

This is good enough.

Now onions. If you haven't figured out, two of my favorite ingredients are onions and garlic.

Chop of the top and bottom first.

Diced into relatively large pieces.

With a little more vegetable oil, we brown the onions in the same pot the beef was browned in.

Now for some garlic.

After the onions are browned a little (like 6 minutes), we throw in the garlic for about 30 seconds.

Then we add 3 tablespoons of flour to make it thicker.

Then slowly add 2 cups of chicken broth.

We also were supposed to throw in a cup of red wine. Unfortunately, I didn't have red wine on hand. Since I didn't want to get rid of the wine, I added some white wine we had and some beef broth and Worcestershire sauce to give it a little more flavor.

Need to stir and make sure to scrape the bottom of the pan to get all those good bits of extra beef.

Then add two bay leaves (I added 3 since one was small). There's a difference between dried bay leaves and fresh ones. I think 1 dried bay leaf equals 2 fresh ones. We also throw in one tablespoon of dried thyme.

Now throw it into the crockpot.

Four red potatoes.

Peeled and cut up into smaller chunks.

Now for the carrots. It was a little intimidating using real carrots b/c I've never used them, and I think my mom's always used baby carrots.

Gotta peel them first (was pretty easy).

And then chopping them up -- again not hard at all.

The recipe didn't really call for celery, but I figured why not.

Chopped up.

The recipe also didn't call for canned tomatoes, but I really like stews this way. In fact next time, I'm going to add more than one can.

And in to the crockpot everything goes.

After a few stirs:

I set it for 5 hours on high. If I had more time, I would've done 10 hours on low, but I didn't. I actually came home at lunch time and made the meal. In all it took about 1:30 minutes to get all the stuff ready (with pictures taken, of course) and into the crockpot.

And here is how I left the kitchen after lunch. It's actually quite messy, and it's a good thing I came home and cleaned it up before Satyan got back.

Anyways, turn the clock 5 hours later, the kitchen is cleaned, and out comes beef stew.

With rice, here's what it looks like.

So overall I was pretty pleased with the dish. I have plenty left in my freezer, and it's quite easy to defrost and reheat. I thought the beef was a little dry (still very tender), which is weird since it was cooked in so much juice and in a crockpot. Maybe I should try preparing it earlier and using low heat? Also, i think I'm going to add more of a tomato base, rather than chicken stock/wine.

Valentine's Day 2008

2008-02-16T13:42:00.000-08:00

Even though this will primarily be a blog about my poor cooking skills, this will also be my personal blog. I probably won't post much here -- only when I do exciting things and want to look cool :-)

Anyways, Valentine's day has come and past. For a single in the city, it wasn't too bad.

The only card I got was this one:

And open inside:

And if you don't know, it's from my dog, who still loves me...

We also went to a huge pillow fight in San Francisco. The video at the bottom does it the most justice, but here are some pics as well.

Picking up Jean who bought 6 pillows from Ross for us.

People getting ready:

Through the night:

Little kids as well:

Chiedo and Jessica:
The rest of us:

It looks like it's snowing, but it's just the feathers:

Some guy outfitted his bike to roast marshmallows:

No need for explanation:

And finally the video, which is just awesome. Paul helped edit it a lot:

For Valentine's day, I was supposed to cook some Korean food on behalf of my Korean lover who's in Pittsburgh. However, because the pillow fight took so long, I postponed it until the day after. I'll be posting pics from that dinner soon...

My First Dinner

2008-02-11T20:57:00.000-08:00

All right, so I've cooked before, but this is my first blog post about cooking. I tried the follow the format set in www.thepioneerwomancooks.com, which is an awesome blog. Somehow she was reading my mind and what I wanted for Valentine's day (besides a girl) and posted the same meal on her blog today, but it's all good. Mine may not be as good, but I cooked it, so that counts for something.

The meal: ribeye steak, garlic mashed potatoes, and balsamic glazed asparagus.

All right, so let's start with the steaks. I'm a believer in some form of marinade unless it's a prime cut of meat, and I usually find Italian dressing works out well, so that's what I used. However, I just got some of Duke's BBQ sauce from back home so I mixed that in as well. It's a sweet, mustard based BBQ sauce,and is something I'll showcase later on when I make some pulled pork sandwiches. I let them marinade overnight.

Living in the city, it's hard to make a good steak. I'm used to a grill, but since I've been here a while I've tried a few different techniques (pan, oven, broiler). From them, I like the broiler the best; however, next time I'm going to give the pan method another try. Anyways, here they are:

And in they go:

After about 8 minutes, they look a little charred, and they're ready to be flipped. I'll flip and rotate them around since nothing cooks perfectly even:

After another 8 minutes and using my handy-dandy, brand new thermapen:

So let's check them out:

All right, so it's 115 degrees now -- not quite ready. I actually learned this isn't the best way to insert the thermometer -- we should going through the side to the center. It's more accurate that way. After this little lesson, I managed not to overcook or undercook the steaks, flipping and rotating to evenly cook them in the broiler. I cooked them to about 130, and after about 10 minutes of resting, I cut the bad boys open to check 'em out.

All right, now on to the garlic mashed potatoes. So after doing this yesterday and reading the pioneer woman's rendition, I've decided her way is much easier. For one, roasting the garlic looks easier and turned out better and the potatoes are easier to deal with (try peeling hot potatoes while your hungry friends are waiting anxiously...). So from now on, I'll use her method, but here's what I did.

First, the candidate spuds.

All right, so first we get some water, throw those potatoes in there, turn it up high, and let it boil.

When it finally boils, turn it down a bit and wait about 20 minutes or so until the potatoes are tender (stick a fork in it).

While we're waiting, let's roast some garlic. One head of garlic is about right. We'll use a saute pan to brown it.

Breaking the head apart into the bulbs, we'll heat it on low heat with the cover on for about 20 minutes, making sure to shake them around a lot so they don't burn.

About 20 minutes later, they've got some brown spots and they're ready to go.

I let them cool and soften a bit in the pan for about 20 minutes. Then I took them out, peeled them, and cut off the hard ends. As you can see, I burned mine a little. I'll try roasting garlic in the oven next time...

Our potatoes are done, so take them out, and start peeling with a small knife.

Taking the peeled spuds, I threw them back into the pot.

Throw those mushy, roasted garlic bulbs in there and take out the masher and get to work.

Last time I made these, I didn't have a masher....much easier this way.

Now, we need to add some butter. One stick is good for the amount of potatoes I took out. To make it easier to add in, let's melt it first.

Throwing that in there, we'll work it around a bit

We're not quite done with the liquid fat. Let's take some half-and-half.

It works a little easier if you warm up the half-and-half first, so I took about 8 ounces and put it in the microwave. Then, we add it a little bit at a time and mix it into the potatoes. I found out that about 6 ounces was all we needed.

Lastly, a little salt and pepper for flavor. Since it's garlic mashed potatoes, why not garlic salt.

While you weren't looking, I also added some chives I had to give them a bit of color.

And there you have it, garlic mashed potatoes. Quite garlicy and tasty too.

Now for the greens. I know some don't like asparagus, but I do, so I figured I'd give it a try. I figured tonight was cooking with the broiler so that's how I prepared the asparagus. Let's meet the bunch.

Grab each piece and just bend until it snaps. This gets rid of the hard, inedible part.

Lining them up on the sheet. I threw on some olive oil and some salt and pepper. Then into the broiler they go for about 8 minutes, flipping them in the middle.

As you can see, I think mine went in a bit too long, but just barely. Anyways, onto our sauce.

Take 3/4 cup of balsamic vinegar.

Put it into a pan over medium-high heat and let it boil.

After about 20 minutes, we get something much thicker. If we try to move it around, you'll see it sticks together.

Pouring it back out, you'll see it's been reduced to about 1/4 cup.

We also want 1/4 cup of olive oil. I decided to add it to the same measuring cup, rather than just drizzle them separately onto the asparagus. They don't mix very well and it made the drizzling a little harder, but in the end it worked out just fine.

One day, I'll try to make some homemade rolls. For now, crescents out of the can work just fine (probably better). I did my best to roll them up well:

But in the end it doesn't really matter :-)

All right, so that's it. Overall the food was quite good. I thought the steaks were a tad sweet (italian dressing + sweet bbq sauce), so next time I'll change it up or won't marinade as long. The mashed potatoes were delicious and the asparagus not too bad for such a green veggie :-)

Hopefully I'll continue to blog about my food posts. Let me know what you guys think.