Flower Bowls and much more.

I wish there was more time in the day to blog and less time to do homework. I did a lot of cooking this week, no specific Halloween themed though, but a lot non the less. Yesterday I went to the Salvation Army to see if they had any cool plates for a couple dollars that I could purchase to maybe spice up how my pictures look. I found these pretty little flower bowls, you can see on the right, that are perfect cup of soup, or rice. To say the least I was very excited when I found them, I think they were even brand new (but of course we'll never know). I really wanted to get some nice plates as well, but I couldnt really find any that struck my fancy, there were some more bowls, but I didnt even need to buy the flowers ones. Anyways, hopefully you will see more pictures with these delightful little things (on a different colored surface then the counter). I will continue my thrift store, interesting plating mission, dont worry.

So I have really been wanting something spicy, and I keep buying these green beans that I leave in the fridge for too long, and then they are gross. So I knew I needed to include my recently purchased beans in my meal. I wanted to do some sort of szechuan or Asian style green bean, but alas I'm always missing some fish juice or clam juice or something that I never feel the energy to go out and get. So I used what I had around the house, some garlic chili sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar to create some sort of sauce for the beans and chicken I was going to cook. Turns out I made it way too spicy, to the point where in the end I couldnt feel my mouth. It was damn worth it though.

Spicy Chili Green Beans and Chicken

After I had burned my mouth off for the night I was really craving some chips, just to munch on. Now I dont buy chips, because it is really easy for me to eat way too many in one sitting, so easy prevention, I dont buy them. But I really wanted them! So my mind flashed back to this one time in highschool, I was at a party with some vegitarian hipster kids and in a drunken stupor they decided to cut up potatoes and fry them, and we ate them as chips. Long shot? No way, it was totally going to work. So without warning I started to peal a potatoe, and cut it up as thin as possible, while heating up some oil for frying. I made a bunch of them to share and mixed up some sour cream and onion dip.

Homemade Potato Chips with Seasalt

Lets just say once the chips were polished off my other roomate started cutting up more potato and reheating the oil for a second round.

The erractic weather in San Francisco had decided to be cold the next day and I really wanted something that would heat me up. Browsing recipes I came accross a Chili recipe that sounded easy. I decided to make it spicier then the recipe had called for, and instead of using ground beef, I decided to take the healthier route and use ground turkey. Which worked out well, since our guest who was staying with us doesnt eat red meat, which i found out when he walked in mid-chili making and explained he was glad he could eat it.

Spicy Turkey Chili


The cooking process

As you can see there was no seafood included in this week, so I really wanted to make some catfish, but alas my girlfriend wanted to eat shrimp, so I opted out of the catfish for the night... but it's coming! Strangely there was not a large shrimp selection at the store that night, so we bought some butterfly shrimp, a pound to be exact and made a couple differnt things. I fried some up with Panko crumbs, make some into gyoza with spinach and my girlfriend cooked the rest up with some garlic. It was quite an adventure.

Shrimp and Spinach Gyoza


fry, fry, fry....


Garlic Shrimp and Spinach (Cooked by Maia)


Panko Shrimp

It was like binging in a seafood marathon.

Days passed and I returned to school once again, but not without the craving of a dearest soup calling my name. Finally when I didnt have any work to do (or was putting it off, either way) I had some free time. I decided to had a second go at the South African Mealie, feeling more confident then the first time. I did the same rountine and it came out just as delicious as last time, success! (I froze it so that I will be able to have it anytime I want).

South African Crab Mealie 2

Finally I've been trying to complete this very simple cinnamon twist recipe. Now I grew up next to a bakery that had the BEST cinnamon twists there ever were. Now I've recently revisted that bakery to make sure I was correct... and I still am. So good. Anyways, I found an easy recipe that used Pilsberry bread sticks, egg and cinnamon sugar. Unfortionitly our mega-safeway didnt have any breadsticks so i opted for cresant rolls or something? Whatever. Anyways, they turned out delicious, but still Im going to need a lot of work, to perfect this... maybe even some homemade dough.

Cinnamon Twists

A week of Seafood and Egg Mcmuffins

What a long week! I had an exam and then Lovefest happened! There's been barely any time to post any of the cooking I did this week! But don't worry, I did many hours of it. This week I made my first soup, tried out my luck with bread crumbs and used fake crab. In fact there was a lot of seafood involved in this week. It first started off with A soup that is apparently very popular in South Africa. I really enjoy soup but its hard for me to find a lot of good places that make their own. There is a little cafe on the corner of my street and most of their soups are really good, but they make them with bell peppers usually. I know as a chef I should be open minded but bell peppers are a really hard thing for me to swallow. Something about the flavor really bothers me. Back to the South African mealie. All the ingredients seemed fairly simple, canned whole corn, creamed corn, evaporated milk, chicken stock, 2 tomato's, butter, onions, salt, pepper and the optional crab. I chose to use crab in my soup. I always have such an accomplished feeling when i clean out a crab and there is a huge pile of meat. I also decided to dice up some potato's to thicken up the soup. I started cooking the soup and added a little white wine to make it abit sweeter. Once the soup was created I tried it and it was a bit too salty, so i drained a cup or two of the broth, removed it and replaced it with water. Success. It tasted perfect. Now when first assessing the soup it seemed like it would be very light because the creamy broth was not very thick, so I served a lot of it to me and my roommate. On the contrary we could barely finish our soup! It was light but still extremely filling. It made probably about 5 or 6 servings and we ate it all week, I even brought some to my girlfriends house for her to try. I discovered that it was also really good with Sriracha hot sauce. Gives it a kick.

South African Crab and Corn Mealie

Hearty and Delicious

After creating this successfully Delicious soup me and my roommate decided we needed to have some good old fried foods. Now I've been reading a lot of recipes for fried foods and most of them are using Panko bread crumbs. I've been eyeing a fried shrimp recipe so I decided to make that, but while looking up a sweet and sour sauce recipe to accompany the shrimp I discovered one of my favorite things to eat when I used to order Chinese food a lot. They are called crab ragoons so I set out on an overly adventurous mission of frying. The ragoons took the longest. I bought some fake crab meat, cream cheese, gyoza wraps and panko crumbs! I made my own version of the crab ragoons and added rice vinegar, it took me at least an hour and a half to make them. Finally I started in with the shrimp and the Panko crumbs, easy frying method, flour, eggs and the Panko crumbs. We had a fried feast!

Fried Shrimp and Crab Ragoons

I had a lot of the ragoon filling left over so the next day I decided to make more for some of my friends that were coming over and they came out a lot prettier.


Fry fry fry...


And eat!

They were even better the second time around. Finally I really needed to start making some breakfast foods, and what better and easier then your own version off egg mcmuffins?! Simple and delicious. I used Canadian bacon and English muffins. The first time I made them i poached the eggs, now I prefer to have yolk when I'm eating eggs but apparently that was not the right choice in this situation. I made them again a few days later and scrambled the eggs. Much better!

Canadian Bacon with Eggs and Cheese on an English Muffin


breakfast time!

Overall a successful breakfast. Now Im back to a hopefully less busy school week.