Cookbook Review · Recipe Roundup

Food, Glorious Food!

I think it was pretty glorious at least. You can let me know what you think after the post. Not surprisingly, we ate a lot of Chinese food after the party. 

The Husband happily ate the shao mai the next day. We also had a fried rice dish that was an experiment and actually worked out! The Husband ate pork slices too.

This one is a meatball dish called Lion’s Head Meatballs from The Food of China. These were very good! They were browned and then braised for an hour and a half. Deliciously tender meatballs were the result. They get their name from the bok choy that they are cooked with that looks like a lion’s man. We did sub chicken for pork.

I had them with rice and sautéed Chinese greens- gai lan and bok choy, with mushrooms, green onions, and garlic. I used sesame oil for the saute oil. I’ve wanted to make these for a while. The Husband had just plain rice with his.

Another Chinese dish was West Lake Beef Soup from The Joy of Chinese Cooking by Lo Mei Hing. We have a similar dish when we go out for fancy Chinese food at Christmas with the Husband’s family and I was excited to find a recipe for it.

One interesting thing about this cookbook, which we found at a booksale last year, is that every single recipe, except desserts, calls for MSG. We omitted that, for obvious reasons, but it tells you how old it is.

After the soup, we got a little tired of Chinese food, so we had a creamy pasta and mushroom dish and a creamy shrimp dish. I only have a picture of the mushroom pasta dish because we were too hungry and devoured the shrimp dish.

The Husband also requested Chicken Marsala and it turned out delicious! We enjoyed it a lot. We had it with a salad and fruit.

I posted a naked pizza picture on Instagram because it was just too pretty to not document. 🙂

The crust is the Pioneer Woman recipe, which I believe is linked here already. It makes a very nice friendly dough. You can also freeze it, but I have not had good luck with that.

Here’s a picture of the finished pizza. We used diced ham, mushrooms, and onions. It had homemade roasted garlic pizza sauce on it too and mozzarella cheese too.

I tried to give Fancy some cheese while making the pizza, but she moved and it all ended up on her back instead of her mouth. Silly girl! Don’t worry, she found it all and snarfed it all up.

I’ve also made waffles and muffins for breakfast and we had grilled cheese and canned soup tonight.

I’m still debating the next book. I kind of went through Food of China by Deh-Ta Hiusing and Nina Simmonds, pretty quickly, but have used a lot of it in before as well. I will do a little bit of a review for it here.

First off, the pictures are gorgeous! It’s a huge book, more of a coffee table book rather than a regular cookbook. The instructions are pretty clear. They requesting using light soy sauce a lot, which tastes horrible, so I generally just reduce the amount and add broth or water instead.

It’s a pretty extensive book, covering everything from appetizers, dim sum, main dishes, and desserts. We’ve used a lot of the recipes from it and they’ve turned out well. If you can find the book, I would get it. It’s definitely worth it. We got it as a gift, so I don’t know where it came from.

Fancy’s latest culinary adventure involved getting her Wobble open to cheat and eat the treats faster. Apparently sweet potatoes are a high value treat option.

She’s a smart dog, but we think it might have been by accident. Hopefully. We need her to not know how to do this regularly, thank you!

This week, I hope to pick a new cookbook to focus on for meals. We had a busy week coming up, so it may be a little interesting schedule wise. The Husband has another play starting soon. Auditions are next week. If anyone wants to come snuggle Fancy, I’m sure she’d be more than happy to accept any and all belly rubs. 😉

I always have trouble knowing how to end my blog posts, so I guess I’ll just say “have a good night!”