Diabetes Cookies

I attempt to end this year with a post so it doesn't seem like I was such a slacker. I present to you fatty butter and sugar cookies. This is the story of my end-of-the-year baking fuck up and how I give my friends diabetes for life!

Pulled Pork

First off, I have a few of apologies that I need to get out of the way; but I have a peace offering in the form of a cat picture.

1. I'm so sorry for neglecting this blog.

2. I'm so sorry for not having a pretty final product photo for this recipe. The reason being is that I was getting ready for finals, so I planned to cook a pot full of pulled pork to feed myself for at least 2 or 3 days. The way it actually turned out was that when it was finished, I got so hungry that I ate all of the pork in one day. Then I spent the other days starving.

3. I'm sorry, Helen, for making you do all of the updating!

Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

I love peanut butter and banana sandwiches; it's one of my all time favorite breakfast/snack foods. I remember when I first read about it in 3rd grade and we had to read this vampire bunny novel. The main character was making a banana peanut butter sandwich, and at first I was like, "Man, that sounds gross!" Of course I had to try it, right? And it turned out to be awesome. A few years ago I decided to add some honey on top, and it was marvelous. More recently I saw a photo from my friend where he sprinkled a bunch of cinnamon on top of it, and of course I had to try that too, and it was even more awesome! Anyways, I've decided to turn this awesomeness into cupcake form!

Spicy Italian Sausage & Lentil Soup

I was talking to the Chopping Block about lentil soup earlier and how we find it rather bland. So I decided to try to liven this soup up with some spice and lots and lots of meat. Okay, so maybe this is more like a hearty sausage soup with a dash of lentils, but whatever, it's all good. I made this soup twice, once with some Italian sausages from the butcher and once with some pre-cooked sausages from the deli aisle. I recommend the butcher stuff. The photo above was with the pre-cooked stuff.

Pumpkin Ginger Cupcakes with Ginger Cream Cheese Frosting

Remember my last pumpkin cake post? Well I finally got myself a cupcake mold and a piping bag! Yay! Since it's still Fall, I wanted to make more pumpkin stuff! So like a few days ago over at My Baking Addiction, Jamie posted these cupcakes that sounded awesome! So that's what we have today, some awesome pumpkin ginger cupcakes.

Garlic Horseradish Mashed Potatoes

You know what I love? The Cheesecake Factory. I know, I know. The Cheesecake Factory is probably the worst food in the world, but who can resist their avocado eggroll appetizer or their delicious cheesecakes? You know what is one of my favorite things from them? Their mashed potatoes. With a little snooping around the internet, I found a little recipe (that I've adjusted) just floating around on a whole bunch of different sites. There seems to be some mixed reviews, but I can honestly say that this mashed potato recipe comes pretty darn close!

Beef Chuck Pot Roast

(Image courtesy of The Chopping Block)

The Chopping Block has been really nice to me (strange, right), so in return I invited her over for dinner along with our friend Brendan and my neighbor Chris. My sister and I went grocery shopping, and we got this four pound beef chuck, which is perfect for a beautiful pot roast!

Pumpkin Cake with Cream Cheese Glaze

Oh my god! It's that time of year again! That time of year when you walk into your grocery store, and it's stocked with pumpkins! Can you help but buy a ton of pumpkin (and pumpkin related groceries)? I think not! And if you can resist, there is something wrong with you, my friend. Last year around this time of year I made a pumpkin loaf with Iva. This time it's a cake instead of bread! Yay!

Pizza Dough

I've been baking a lot of pizza lately because it turns out that making pizza is really easy. Seriously! All it takes is time, so plan ahead. It'll at least an hour for your dough to rise. The recipes say that you can refrigerate the dough overnight and use it the next day as well.

Glutinous Rice Balls

What is a glutinous rice ball? It's a chewy ball of dough that's filled with sweet sweet awesomeness. In Chinese they're called Tong Yuen (Cantonese) or I guess Tang Yuan (Mandarin). "Tong" means soup and "yuen" means round. You can read about them in this Wikipedia page.

Mac 'n Cheese

I invited the Chopping Block over for dinner, and I made her some macaroni and cheese! I also served it with some sweet carrot mash, some cornbread (with corn kernels hidden inside), and some barbecue ribs.

White Cake with Lemon Curd and Cream Cheese Frosting

Following up on the lemon curd post, we're going to use it to make a cake! A delicious lemony cake!



I got the recipe off of Epicurious, which I made some adjustments to since their recipe was for a giant cake, and I am only making a small little itty bitty cake.

Lemon Curd

Finally! A post after an entire month! I'm sure you've been wondering what I've been up to, right? Well, I drove my little Honda Fit across country from Pittsburgh, PA back to San Francisco (with my two cats)! I reunited with Gandalf except now Gandalf and Megatron don't get along. My mom also fell in love with Gandalf (as well as Furious), and so Gandalf has become my mom's cat. So that's the update!



So what I have for today is this delicious lemon curd recipe from David Lebovitz. I've made this a couple of times, and it's always fantastic! Not a single change needs to be made. Before we start, I'm going to warn you that we're not going to use a double boiler, which I think is pretty freaking awesome. As David Lebovitz says, we're going to be dare-devils today.

Potato-less New England Clam Chowder

You know what I hate? Potatoes in my clam chowder. Seriously! I always feel like I'm getting ripped off when I get a bowl full of potatoes with one or two clams, and because of that, I started to hate potatoes in my chowder. That delicious starchy vegetable has become a bane in my side, so I decided to get rid of it completely. You heard me right. Blasphemy.

Japanese Curry

I think I picked up on another craze in addition to the burger craze. It's curry!

Being a weirdo, I've never really had Japanese curry before. That is, it has never crossed my mind to order curry when sitting at a Japanese restaurant. I had, however, tried a spoon or two of the curry off someone else's order. It had never strike me as good enough that I would pass ordering sushi for curry, so I continued to eat just sushi to meet my Japanese food requirement. Stupid, I know. That's just like only eat phở and say that I always eat Vietnamese food. Silly me.

To rectify this problem, I made Japanese curry found over at No Recipes. Don't worry, he provides recipes.

Turkey Pesto Burgers

I love turkey. I felt bad when our neighborhood had some super cute wild turkeys roaming...

"Grilled" Romantic Heart

The below conversation happened in Vietnamese:

My mom: Do you want some lettuce?
Me: What kind of lettuce?
My mom: Your favorite lettuce, remember? [in English] heart romantic!

That was how my mom referred to hearts of Romaine. It's incredibly cute. From now on, I'm going to call Romaine lettuce heart romantic lettuce instead.

Let me tell you about a silly little love affair between the beautiful and delicate Heart Romantic Lettuce and the bad bad Delicious Bacon boy who stopped the sweet lettuce in her track via a heart attack.

Brownie Roll Out Cookies

I've been baking a lot lately. I don't know why but I find baking simple cookies a relaxing activity. So when Helen sent me this brownie roll-out cookie recipe from Smitten Kitchen, I felt like I had to make it right away...because I was um..."stressed out" and needed some relaxing.

Inside Out Reeses Peanut Butter Cup Cupcakes

So I baked these cupcakes for a very special person who loooooovvvvveeeees Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. They're cute little chocolate cupcakes filled with a chocolate custard and topped with a peanut butter and cream cheese frosting! They're absolutely amazing! And if you know me, I don't even like chocolate very much, much less something so decadent!

Vegetable Kurma

A while ago, I made some chicken kurma with a recipe from Serious Eats. Although it was quite delicious (I made it for Brendan and he didn't complain), when I showed the recipe to my friend, Ruby, she thought that it was quite "ghetto." I'm all for ghetto recipes because I have no standards, or rather, really low standards. However, I decided that it'd be a good idea to try and make some kurma from a not-so-ghetto recipe.

I found this recipe from Edible Garden for a vegetable kurma. My friend, Nur, also had it bookmarked!

Caramelized Onions, Mushroom, and Spinach Quiche

So you might think this is a break from the burger experiments, but I kid you not, I've been eating hamburgers non-stop. Last night I had a mushroom and caramelized onion burger. Yup. This morning I decided it would be a great idea to make a quiche with mushrooms and caramelized onions. This is my first quiche, and I didn't follow any recipes. Dave predicts that it will be disgusting. We'll show him!

Burger Experiment #3

To continue on with the Burger Experiment spreadsheet, I decided to make curry burger because it seemed easiest to make for a lazy dinner.

I decided to use Thai red curry paste because it's something I already had in my cupboard.

Burger Experiment #2

So following up on the previous post from the Chopping Block, I decided that I really wanted a delicious hamburger, but where should I go get one? I know. My kitchen. Anyways, this is kind of like a fake "burger experiment" because it's not on the Google doc (and it's just really minor)! In this experiment, I put an extra slice of cheddar and added roast garlic!

Burger Experiment #1

As Helen mentioned earlier, I currently have an obsession with burgers. I created a Google spreadsheet to ask for suggestions from Helen and Brendan.

Within the first few days, the list grew like crazy! I think these people are really creative fatties.

This past Thursday was the first burger experiment. Here's the low down/menu:

- Burgers stuffed with bacon pieces.
- Burgers patties are made by gently pushing the meat into patty form without any mixing.
- Burger meats are not seasoned until after the patties are formed. Then salt is sprinkled on both sides.
- Burger accessories:
   - Guacamole with pineapples. The three people (not counting me) who ate this version concluded that it's good.
   - Cilantro pesto.
   - Bacon.
   - Fried egg with a runny yolk.
   - Ketchup and mustard.

Soy Sauce Swai and Guacamole

I don't want to be left out of the lazy post loop, so here's my lazy post.

Pork Lettuce Wraps

Pork. Pork pork pork pork. I don't think I eat much pork. Oh wait, yes I do. I eat a lot of the Chopping Block's Lemongrass Pork Chops, bacon, some barbecue pork, some roast pork and .... more bacon. But you see, there's not a whole lot of ground pork in the mix. To be honest, I bought the ground pork to make some fish paste & pork patties. Sounds gross? Eh. I can't tell you because I decided to make this dish instead.

Beef Stir-Fry with Green Beans

So I had a lot of vegetables left over from some previous meals that I had to get rid of. The perfect way to get rid of vegetables is stir-fry; I'm sure Drea would agree. So this is just one of those random-let's-throw-everything-in kind of meal post.

Pri's "Thai" Fried Rice

I was taking a stroll in the jungle one day and all of the sudden, a guerrilla chef and his pet gorilla jumped out in front of me.

Sweet & Tangy Oven Roasted Chicken

So this was my attempt at making some Korean BBQ chicken, otherwise known as Dakgalbi, but as you can tell from the title, it didn't really come out tasting like Dakgalbi. It was sweet and very oniony with a very pungent sesame taste. It wasn't bad though! It's actually pretty good, so... it's a win, right?

Brownie Cookies

First, a little back story. I bragged to someone that I knew the reason why brownies have that nice flaky crust on the top while cakes don't. I said that it's because of the unbeaten egg whites (just stirred in and not beaten) float to the top of the batter and created that nice flaky crust. I should have known better than to brag without any back up of experimental data because that someone actually went and did research on brownie flaky top crust and found this article from The Kitchn.

Swirly Chocolate (Chip) Cookies

So here's a cookie that's all swirly with chocolate swirls. I hope you noticed that label of "misadventure" because these were supposed to be chocolate chip cookies and not these swirly cookies! D:

Leafy Pizza

There've been so many meaty dishes on this site, I wanted to contribute a veggilicious one :P Pizza is one of my, "I'm so tired," dishes. Y'know, one of the meals you could fix with your eyes closed? So I almost never play with the recipe. Tonight, because my exhaustion struck on Friday, I found a mostly covered 2nd crust in my fridge and new "Oh, I need to do pizza again before the crust goes stale."

Magnetic Spice "Rack"

Hi everyone! I made a post on my "craft and things" blog on how I put together a magnetic spice collection. It's really pretty and was really fun to make. If you don't already have a spice rack and would like to save on counter space, maybe consider making this for fun.

Fruit Filled Meatballs

So we have meatballs again! Haha. Yes, the Chopping Block still has an obsession with hamburgers and even created a shared document for hamburger ideas, and so I guess now I'm in that ground beef kind of rut too. I happen to have some mangos and pineapples along with some awesome guacamole ingredients, and so this concoction was born. Well, I guess it was also heavily influenced by the fact that mangos & avocados together are the bomb. The Chopping Block always raves to me about how awesome guacamole topped hamburgers are (this is why I have the guacamole ingredients), and so the hamburger journey continues.

Strawberry Bread Puding

I cleaned out my fridge last week, and found that I'd been hoarding bread. I had 3 of these bowls. That's a LOT of bread pudding. I made bread pudding over the holiday season, partially out of curiosity. That one was a different recipe (there are a bazillion) but the basic one is super simple.

Cream Cheese Stuffed Meatballs

Hi friends! Sorry it's been such a long time since I've posted. :( I was talking to the Chopping Block a lot lately about hamburgers. She has an obsession with them, but who can blame her; May is national hamburger month after all. My current obsession (for the last couple of days) has been cream cheese. So with that, I've created the most delicious meatball ever. Seriously. No lie.

Lunch Date Recipes

So I don't really go out to eat much any more. So making food-related dates special means putting a little effort into lunch. Mostly, this meal is comprised of assorted leftovers and arranged to look pretty.

So the recipes of each of the dishes are, starting with the meat:

Terriyaki chicken

1 frozen chicken breast
honey
soy sauce
sake

Nuke the chicken until it starts to cook.
In a skillet, place enough sake and soy sauce to just barely coat the pan. Add a touch of honey, (maybe 1/2 a tablespoon?)
Chop up the chicken into tiny bits, and add to sauce after honey has melted.
Stir chicken until it is evenly cooked and browned.
Then you're done!

Stir Fried Rice Noodles

This dish came about because I had a massive honking bag of rice noodles I picked up because they "looked yummy" but had No Idea what to do with them. Letran told me: "stir fry 'em!" I said "With what seasoning?" "Vegetable oil, soy sauce and sesame oil." Me: "Oh, I got those things!"

So...boil rice noodles, fry them in:
Canola Oil
Soy Sauce
Sesame oil

Vegetables in the rice noodles:
Green onion
Cabbage
Carrot
Mushroom

--add these vegies in while the rice is browning. My bag was super big, and so I had to use my wok for this dish. It made a lot of leftovers, some of which were in this lunch.

The broccoli ringing the noodles was frozen, I warmed it in the microwave and ringed the noodles with them.

Garam Masala Oatmeal Cookies

I was researching spices and ran into a recipe for Garam Masala Oatmeal Raisin Cookies on NPR. What do you know? I have just bought some garam masala so I decided to make it. Did you know that garam means heat and masala means spice mix? Well, now you know!

Fried Oyster Mushroom with Seaweed

Friend are such great inspirations. Nur mentioned to me that she got an oyster mushroom growing kit and it immediately reminded me of this dish. I learned about this from one of my parents' vegetarian friends. Actually, I didn't learn it the proper way. I came over for dinner, they were making this and somehow I helped them made it. Basically, I stole the recipe. Now you can be a part of my band of recipe thieves and make this, too!

Tomato Egg Cups

Nur sent me this recipe from La Casita Inspirada out of the blue. It's super easy and pretty so I made it.


Two beautiful and ripe tomatoes? Check.


Hollow out tomatoes' innards? Check.


Fill each tomato with an egg, some ground pepper, and salt? Check, check, and check!



Pop in preheated 425 degrees F oven for 20 minutes, then top with crispy bacon bits? Check! The recipe actually says to top it off with cheese but I think bacon is greater than cheese, so I went with bacon.

That's it. I actually switched to the broiler option for an additional 5 minutes because I do not like my eggs so runny. So easy and pretty even a LeTran can do it!

Chicken Pasta Salad

This was one of those "I'm hungry and don't wanna walk to the store," sorta meals. Very easy.

What I had:

Greek yogurt
green onions
1/4 bag of wheat pasta
lettuce
frozen chicken
sandwich pickles

So chicken salad it is!

1st I cooked the chicken in the microwave and boiled the water for the pasta.

I sliced the green onion, 2 sandwich pickles, and the lettuce.

I placed the pickles and green onions in a mixing bowl. Added pasta to boiling water. Chopped the chicken into bite-sized bits, then added to the mixing bowl.

When the pasta was cooked, it went in to. I added a dash of garlic salt for taste, and tossed the mixing bowl contents with 1/4 cup Greek yogurt (-ish, sorry, I cook by instinct, not measurement), point is to coat, but not soak. Just a bit, not too much.

The lettuce I placed in the bottom of the bowl (sorry, can't see it in the picture) and scooped some of the chicken salad mix on top.

Very simple,. very yummy!

Waffle Ice Cream Sandwich

In the previous post, I talked about candied bacon ice cream. Then that spawned this conversation:

Brendan: make the ice cream
and add chunks of egg in it
LeTran: cooked eggs? (commentary: I'm not stupid, ice cream has uncooked eggs in it)
Brendan: yup
and a bit of waffle
oh oh, nix the egg
and just put pieces of syrupy waffles with the bacon
orrr a bacon ice cream sandwich
LeTran: omg waffle ice cream sandwich
waffle bacon ice cream sandwich
Brendan: ohhhhh omg
that is a real good idea
no joking

...and so it began...

Spicy Candied Bacon

Studying gave me serious cases of the munchies. No lie. Checked the fridge for tasty drinks. None. Checked everywhere in kitchen for random snacks. Nada. Well, except for those stale/raw almonds. Then I remembered that I had some bacon left from previous bacon adventures. My fatty mind was craving something sweet. The light bulb went on! I also remembered seeing a recipe for Spicy Candied Bacon from Serious Eats.

What do you think my bright idea was?

Misadventure: Strawberry Stuffed Ice Cream

Remember Brendan? I was having a little chat with Brendan about food...because there are only three things that I talk about 1. food, 2. cats, 3. dogs. I'm not well-rounded. I cannot hold an intelligent conversation about politics, history, geography, philosophy, literature, string theory, game theory, human behavior, etc. But I digress.

Brendan and I were talking about ice cream sandwiches. Who doesn't like ice cream sandwiches? Then Brendan had the brilliant idea of making ice cream sandwiches not with cookies, but with fruits instead. Talking with Brendan tickled my brain, so I started to think about stuffing fruits with ice cream. Basically, the conversation went something like this...okay, maybe not a bit, but exactly like this:

Brendan: i wonder if ice cream sandwiches would be good with fruit as the bread like mango ice cream inside slices of mango
me: too slippery
Brendan: or ice cream between wedges of banana
me: OR ice cream in hollowed out strawberries
Brendan: ooo, i like that one, and then it can be dipped in chocolate
me: yes!
Brendan: for extreme tastiness
me: and rolled in a bit a sea salt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! akdjfaoier
Brendan: haha
me: just a tiny bit
Brendan: you're one of those salty choco people/

...and so that conversation gave fruit to this misadventure!

Cilantro Pesto Pizza

I am not dead yet! I've been um...lazy and there isn't any good excuses (or excuses at all) as to why I neglected the blog. I am so sorry!

Back to the actual food part, remember how I made the mango salsa? It was quite delicious. Actually, Helen and I like it a lot.

The thing about making salsa is that you will always be left with a giant bunch of cilantro that you have no idea how to use up. I mean, do you make more salsa and eat it for two weeks? I love them salsa but that would be too much. So I searched for an easy way to use most of my leftover cilantro and found Bobby Flay's Grill Shrimp and Cilantro Pesto Pizza. It was actually really convenience because I had leftover mango salsa to use as a topping for the pizza, too!