Tag: pork

Cookbook Review · Recipe Roundup

Food, Glorious Food!

LSiehLeave a comment

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!”

Catching Up- Lunar New Year Party
Party Posts · Recipe Roundup

Catching Up- Lunar New Year Party

LSiehLeave a comment

I had good intentions to write this post for the last couple days and then had very bad news at work and a couple of migraines. I’m feeling better today, luckily.

Our Lunar New Year Party was lots of fun! We had planned to watch Crazy Rich Asians, but I went a little large on the guest list and we just don’t have comfy seating for 13 people! So we’ll have to watch it another time.

We had a Dim Sum theme this year and didn’t have a big main dish, just a bunch of smaller ones. But there was still lots of food. I went to the Asian market and got huge bags of produce, which we are now eating in everything to use up. I foisted some off on my in-laws today though, so hopefully we can finish off the rest of it.

We did have some store bought things this year. I’ve given up trying to make egg rolls or spring rolls. They just aren’t worth the work for me and never seem to come out right. We bought veggie spring rolls from Costco this time.

I also used these rice packet things from the Asian market. We get these for Dim Sum, but I can’t eat them because of the pork sausage that is in them. These ones just had dried shrimp, so I picked them up. They have some lovely spices too and were nice for lunch. They are wrapped in tea leaves, so you only eat the inside.

Another Dim Sum favorite of mine is the steamed Chinese Broccoli, or Gai Lan. It’s very much like broccoli in taste, but has leaves instead of the the florets. I’m sure I was the only one to eat it, but it made my heart happy. 🙂

I did make two kinds of bao, although these are just the pork ones. I had 5 spice chicken bao as well, but they got eaten up quick. These were both made up recipes, although I did use a recipe for the Bao dough from The Food of China. I think I posted the recipe last year in the party post, but can repost it if you’d like it.

I roasted a whole pork loin in thinned out char sai sauce (Chinese bbq sauce) and chopped that for the pork filling. The chicken filling was ground chicken, sauces, bamboo shoots, garlic, and scallions in them.

We had pork shao mai, which was from the Husband’s family recipe book! According to the Husband, his mom and dad may have collected the recipes from his paternal grandma. Most of them are typed, but there are a couple that are handwritten. The shao mai were eaten before I started taking pictures.

The crab stuffed mushrooms were also from the book and were delicious! They called for a “creamy white sauce” so I made one to go in it. Fake crab was used. We’ve discovered that we don’t always need real crab. It was exciting to use it and there will certainly be some dinners from there as well.

The lettuce wraps look a little sad in this picture, as we had eaten most of them. These were made with ground turkey. These were my own recipe, meaning I threw a bunch of sauces and sauce ingredients at them until the filling tasted good. 🙂

A new recipe, that I may not make again, was fried pork ribs. I texted the Husband from the Asian Market and he was very enthusiastic. I was, of course, thinking I didn’t have enough pork and would need one more dish. I was told they were good, but only fried half of them. They spit at me a lot and burned me.

The Husband baked the rest of them for dinner during the week and said that worked too. They marinated for a long time in a 5 spice based marinade and were then battered and fried, or baked. These were from the Food of China.

We had Clementine Cakes from The Woks of Life. https://thewoksoflife.com/2014/10/clementine-cakes/

I highly recommend this website, as it has so many recipes and information on it for all your Asian culinary dreams. Someday I’ll get brave enough to make the coconut buns!

Back to the cakes though. I used blood oranges. The clementines were hard to find and I didn’t want to use them. I also didn’t glaze them and intended to make a frosting, but they didn’t get frosted. I did use super cute silicone cupcake molds though that had fortunes on the bottom!

Traditional almond cookies were also served. I used the recipe from my Food of China book and didn’t have blanched almonds and just left them off the tops. These didn’t brown, except on the bottoms, so be aware of that if you make them.

I think that was all the food! We didn’t manage a picture of the whole table, but I do have a picture of a table to share!

I found this Lego version of a Lunar New Year Dinner on Amazon really randomly while looking for the lucky coins we gave as favors this year. It was only available in Malaysia, but was somehow being sold by a toy company in New Jersey. I had no idea of any of this, the Husband found out after I gave it to him. 🙂 One of his superpowers is research. It was perfect for us though! It even has the Chinese broccoli!!

Here’s a close up of the table.

We also have started collecting the Lego zodiac sets, so here’s last year’s dog and this year’s pig.

I’ll leave you with some other pretty pictures of our decor. I nerded out a little and made the bookshelf display Firefly themed. I couldn’t help myself!

It was very fun and next year we’ll have to do some experimenting with how we want to run it. I made all of the fillings ahead of time, which helped, but I still need to rethink how we do this party. I end up making everyone feel awkward, I think, while I’m racing around trying to finish things. When I suggested a potluck idea to the Husband, he said “I’m surprised you can even say those words!” Ha.. Ha.. Ha..

I’ll let you know how it turns out. 🙂 Have a great weekend!

Recipe Roundup

Recipe Roundup

LSiehLeave a comment

I didn’t do much crafting this weekend, as we were partying it up! I did do a whole bunch of baking though. 🙂 I ended up trying six new recipes for the party. I’m going to make the party its own post, as I tried so many new things.

1- Hearty New England Dinner from Taste of Home Market Fresh Cookbook. 

Modifications: I cheated and left out the cabbage. The Husband doesn’t eat it and so we didn’t have any, and I’m not a huge fan of it cooked anyway. This was from the cabbage section though, so I may have to try another recipe, since I ignored that part. We never actual ate this as a meal. I had it as a snack the night it was made, but I started it late, so it wasn’t done until 10 pm.

Oh my gosh, this was delicious. I have actually made a pot roast that was too dry before, using a larger crock pot, but this was good. It had 2 cups of broth in it, which kept it very moist. It didn’t include potatoes, like my normal recipe. I fudged a recipe for onion soup mix, it was just basically beef bullion, onion powder, pepper, and garlic powder. The only other thing it called for was dried onions and I just used a little more fresh onion.

2- Shredded Beef Sandwiches, method by me.

Modifications: I added sautéed peppers and mushrooms and Gruyere cheese. I also made my own french bread with a recipe I think I’ve shared and now can’t find from Tasty Kitchen. Mmmm…. so good. This would be a good option to use up leftover pot roast for sure.

3- Asian Pork Chops, marinade by me, Cooked by the Husband. I have talked about these before, but I threw soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic powder, and white pepper over the chops in a pan and the Husband threw them in the oven when he got home. I had also left carrots with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper and he roasted them along with cooking the chops. Apparently they were both delicious.

4- Silver White Cupcakes from The Good Housekeeping Cookbook edited by Dorothy B. Marsh. Section: Our Best Cakes. 

Modifications: Used orange flavoring instead of vanilla. I frosted them with a basic orange buttercream. This was my family’s traditional Easter cupcake recipe and the cake I most often requested for my birthday. I was excited to have my own copy of it now. We found the cookbook in a bin at the thrift store and the lady at the checkout was very jealous.

This cookbook is fun because it shows the shift from the 50’s where things were just getting more “ready made” into the 60’s where it was suddenly cool to have store bought things. There are a few bizarre recipes in here and the cake section has a few pages that talk about how to jazz up store bought cakes. The bread section does it too. I keep looking through it for dinner ideas, but it’s such  big book, I think I get a little overwhelmed.

I was terrible at taking pictures of things this past week. I wasn’t home for some of the dinners and the ate all the other foods before I could get out a camera. I will try to do better this week and have the Husband take a picture of Tuesday’s dinner before he eats it.

Now, on to the party foods!