My birthday!

Although MM was on call on my birthday (boohoo), I had the opportunity to go out with my girlfriends that night for a nice quiet dinner at Maggiano's. One of my medical school friends is on a gluten free diet (AKA "a wheat allergy"), which through a great bout of irony is more common in Italians, and Maggiano's has a great gluten free menu. I also thought I could have my long noodles, but in all my birthday excitement, I had gnocchi instead. Short potato pasta.

SUPERSTITION FAIL.

The next night, when MM was post-call, he took me out to the Capital Grille, our go-to fancy place. I love love LOVE the Capital Grille. Who cares if it's a chain? I love how on special occasions, they take your picture, and give you a take home card with it that says "Live well and always find cause for celebration". I am sappy like that.

Despite MM urging me to try something new, I couldn't help but get my usual. The filet oscar. OH. EM. GEE. It's delicious. Go to your nearest Capital Grille and have one now if you haven't already.

It's divine. Source

We finished with a heavenly chocolate cake. Also divine, but nothing touches the filet oscar. NOTHING.

My lovely mother also sent me a birthday package. Included was three (3!!!) bags of homemade chocolate chip cookies, a box of brownies, 2 pairs of shoes (did I ever mention that I take after my mother, and that we LOVE shoes?), and 2 tops. I heart my mom. If I grow up to be exactly like her, I'd be ecstatic.

Oh, and she also included a birthday card. "I forgot to run to the store." she had explained. Witness:

Note the very carefully applied white-out

"It's semi-homemade!" (We also both love the food channel--Sandra Lee anyone?) My mom cracks me up.

All in all, a pretty awesome and delicious birthday. YAY ME!

Back on the [blogging] ball

I'm not going to lie--this was a very hard post to write. Not because it's picture heavy (sorry) or controversial (sorry) but because it's my FIRST POST IN OVER A MONTH.

*hangs head in shame*

Blogging is like exercising. Super easy once you have your routine down, and you are doing it regularly. But stop for a while, and that first run is TORTURE.

So this is my attempt to start. Again. We'll do this chronologically:

Utah
MM and I had so much fun snowboarding out in Salt Lake City (SLC)! We stayed with his wonderful aunt and uncle out in Sandy, UT, and were a short drive from Solitude, where we spent five awesome days snowboarding.

MM and I on the slopes!

Luckily for my rear end, I got a lot better at snowboarding than when we went to Wisconsin, and I even went on some blue runs! (For those of you who aren't familiar, like myself a few months ago, in order of increasing difficulty: green, blue, black diamond, double black diamond etc)

MM and I at the summit at Solitude. How badass am I?? (not really; I am hanging on for dear life.)

Unfortunately for my rear end, my last day of snowboarding was strongly punctuated when I landed HARD on my bum on a flat trail under some flat light, and let me tell you: it HURT. As in, it brought tears to my eyes as soon as it happened --that kind of hurt.

Thankfully MM's aunt let me use a bag of frozen peas to ice it when I got home (don't worry, they were not consumed later), and though my rear end still hurts a little when I run now, I still think the trip was still TOTALLY fun and worth it. I mean, just look at the view!

SOO much fun. And highly recommended.

Florida
After our snowboarding stint in Utah, we flew down to Florida for a few days to spend time with MM's parents. And as fun as our snowy adventures were, holy canoli was I glad to be in warm weather.

Basking in the sun. Pretty much what I did everyday.

While we were there, we ate at Tarpon Bay at the Hyatt Regency in Bonita Springs and had some of the most delicious seafood while seated over the water.

(Photo from google images)

We also celebrated MM's father's birthday while we were down there with a GIANT sushi boat.

Not our boat, but you get the idea. Source

The three of us took the whole thing down like champs. It was pretty epic.

While we were down there, MM's dad also showed me how to shuck oysters!! I took a picture of him shucking, but since I have not asked his permission to plaster his face all over the interwebs, I will refrain from posting it. It was a great experience though! I never knew shucking oysters was so easy. I got the hang of it after about six, and shucked the last six of our dozen like a pro. If my cholesterol weren't already high, I would totally eat oysters all the time...

And that concludes my February vacation! Up next: my birthday and match day!

To Utah!!

Posting will be light for the next week!

See you (hopefully minimally bruised) in a bit!

Chinese New Year: Wontons

Okay, one last flashback from CNY: shrimp and pork wontons. I am not crazy about wonton soup, but after frying my turnip cake, I couldn't very well fry my wontons too, so soup it was.

I improvised this recipe for the most part, and overall it came out pretty tasty!

You will need:
3/4 lb Ground pork
Handful of uncooked shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 bunch of scallions
Sesame oil
Soy sauce
White pepper to taste

That is white pepper on my pork--it's not rotten, I promise

Chop up your shrimp into small pieces, and combine all ingredients in a bowl. I ended up using about a tablespoon of sesame oil, and 3 tablespoons of soy sauce. In retrospect, I would have used a little more soy sauce or added some additional salt because it was a little lacking in flavor.

Set up your wonton making station:

Your meat mixture, your wonton wrappers, and a bowl of water.

To make my wontons, I used the following method: Spoon a teaspoon or so of the meat mixture onto the center of a wonton wrapper. Using your index finger, wet two adjacent edges of the square wrapper with the water, like so:

The wrappers are lightly coated in corn starch, so wetting the edges will form a little "glue". Fold your wonton into a triangle, using the wet edges to seal in the meat securely. Make sure there is no trapped air in your wonton. Next, moisten one tip of the triangle, and press it against the other, forming a little "flower":

Isn't it cute?? Continue until you have used up your meat mixture. If you overstuff some of your wontons, like I did, they may become unsealed when you cook them.

Do NOT, I repeat do NOT stack your wontons like this. The moisture from the meat inside will cause them all to stick to one another, and it will be a big mess, and some of them will definitely come apart while cooking. Instead, place your fresh wontons a single layer on a lightly corn-starched/floured surface.

Bring a pot of water to a boil, then cook the wontons on simmer, uncovered and stirring occasionally. When they are done, they will float to the top. Add to soup, or fry, and you have yourself some wontons!

YUM!

Chinese New Year: Turnip cake

Now that I have recovered from cooking that huge meal on Chinese New Year's Eve, I shall go back and share that long and painful process with you all.

Starting with the turnip cake. I very loosely adapted a recipe from Appetite for China, and set off to H mart to get my ingredients. Of course, being the wonderfully prepared person I am, I forgot the list. So I may have improvised a little.

You will need:
3 1/4 cups rice flour
2 lbs of turnip
Add ins of your choice (I used Chinese sausage, or lop cheong)
Soy sauce (regular or dark)
Salt

First of all, the recipe called for 2 cups of water to combine with the rice flour, then to mix until it became "velvety". I added 2 cups to my flour, and the best consistency I could get was "ricotta cheese". So I ended up adding a little more water (hey, Chinese cooking is an imperfect science, okay?), probably closer to 3 cups, until it became smooth like cake batter.
 
Kuan's recipe also calls for 1 large Chinese turnip, weighing about 2 pounds. I couldn't find that big of a freakin turnip, so I ended up with 5 of these things:

Together, they weighed about 1.8 lbs. Good enough. Peel them suckers and slice them into rectangles about 2 cm wide and deep (see picture below). Next for MM's favorite, the lop cheong:

We made the mistake last time of buying the sweet kind. Do not make that same mistake. Kuan's recipe also called for some mushrooms and dried shrimp, or har mai, which I don't care for, so I left it out. Instead, I had some scallions lying around, so I chopped those up along with the lop cheong.

Next you want to cook the add ins with a little bit of soy sauce for some flavor. Set those aside. In that same wok, add your turnip and stir fry for about 2-3 minutes, adding in more oil if needed.

Then pour in about 1 cup of water, and steam the turnip for about 10-15 minutes until just cooked. My turnip was still a little hard at 15 minutes, so I actually ended up steaming it for about 25 minutes. Whatever.

Next, the recipe calls for adding the hot turnip mixture into the rice flour mixture and "mixing thoroughly until the turnips are well incorporated". WTF? What does well incorporated mean? We will never know because her blog pictures the original raw ingredients, and then a perfectly finished turnip cake, so I had to guess. I'd seen my grandmother make taro cake (wu tao gow) before, and her finished "batter" was smooth without large pieces of taro in it, so I figured the turnip cake would be the same way.

That was about as "incorporated" as I could get it. Still has the consistency of thick ricotta cheese, and still with big chunks of turnip in it. I tried mashing the turnip into the flour mixture, but eventually got tired of that and left it as it. You couldn't really tell there were turnip chunks in the consistency of the final cake, so I imagine this degree of "incorporation" is fine. Anyway.

Mix in your add ins, in my case the lop cheong and scallions, and salt to taste (I added 1 tsp like the recipe called for, but it probably could have used a little more salt). Pour into a 10 inch cake pan, and smooth out the top.

Do NOT, as I did, use a round bottom pot. The middle will be a little undercooked when the edges are finished steaming. Bad Idea.

So steam the cake for about an hour (I steamed it for an hour and twenty minutes, which turned out better since the middle was still a little underdone), and allow the cake to cool before slicing.

The "optional" part, but not really optional, because turnip cake isn't good without it: the frying. After you slice the cake into small rectangles, fry the slices in batches about 3-5 minutes on each side in oil, and serve with (my favorite) hoisin sauce.

You can check out my cake in my CNY post, but Kuan has a better picture in her blog, so let's pretend my cake looked like that:

Source

Then, enjoy!!! My homemade turnip cake turned out pretty decently, and as I mentioned was MM's favorite item on the menu. The texture was still a little off, due to the fact that the middle wasn't quite steamed through after more than an hour. That being said, I still enjoy it, but with all this effort, I think I will just stick to buying it in the future!

College style cooking

It's a little embarrassing that I am well past (well not that far past) my college years, but I am still cooking like a college student. By this, I don't mean I am cooking ramen every day or reheating TV dinners, but I just don't have a lot of specialty cookware and sometimes I need to improvise.

And by specialty cookware, I mean basic cookware. Or bakeware. Like a rolling pin. For your viewing pleasure, here is the "rolling pin" I used to make my egg tarts for Chinese New Year:

Yes, that is a liquor bottle (99 bananas to be exact) covered in plastic wrap. It wasn't perfect by far, but it got the job done.

Oh, and my "steamer" prior to Chinese New Year was this:

Allow me to explain this state-of-the-art steamer. That is a big pot with a little upside down bowl, on top of which I place a slightly bigger bowl, whose base fits on top of that little bowl. In that slightly bigger bowl, I place whatever I want to steam. Sounds foolproof, doesn't it? Except that the biggest bowl that will fit in this "steamer" is 5" in diameter, essentially only fitting in 1 serving of vegetables to steam.

Since I wanted to steam a fish and a turnip cake for Chinese New Year, I decided to cave and buy a real steamer. It was a beautiful, 3 tiered stainless steel beauty from my local H Mart. The one problem?

The dishes I wanted to steam were the right diameter, but just a tad too tall for the height of each tier. So I was forced, once again, to rig the steamer to fit a taller dish by turning the top tier upside down and putting the lid on the "bottom" of the top tier.

Apparently I am doomed to always turn things upside down when I steam.

Anybody else have any, er, "creative" cooking methods?

I don't heart having to break in new shoes

(WARNING: picture of part of a foot ahead)

I hate when this happens. I was breaking in my Pumas, and went for a walk a little longer than I intended to, and now I have bandaids across both my Achilles tendons. Boooo stiff new shoes.

Anybody know of any way around this?