English Muffins (and Crab Benedict)

My favorite brunch place in the city is a little place called Town's End Restaurant, which we've nicknamed "the muffin place" because of their complementary muffins and scones. It's my favorite restaurant for three reasons: 1) delicious complementary baked goodies 2) it's a nice walking distance from my place and 3) their crab benedict. Trust me, whenever there is a crab benedict on a brunch menu, I've ordered it, and from all the places I've been, this restaurant has the best. I think a main reason for this is that they bake their own english muffins (they bake all their baked goods there). So I decided to make a little challenge for myself and make a crab benedict with everything from scratch.

Moroccan Lamb Shank and Chickpeas

Sit down, make yourself comfortable, I have a story to tell. I found this recipe sitting in my inbox (from me, no less) with the label "Recipes" attached to it. That was great and all, except I didn't recollect reading this recipe or emailing it to myself. It's from Blue-Kitchen which is a new food blog to me. It's a very good one, by the way. Somehow, I led myself to discover this wonderful dish without knowing it. Thank you, past me, you were great!

I had a bag of dried chickpeas from the Dixon fruit stand on the side of I-80. I remember deciding to stop by the fruit stand one weekend while I was driving toward Sacramento. Reason? None! Not only that, I was in my pajamas from the night before. Yes, I like to drive long distance in my pajamas. So, I stealthily stripped off my pajamas in the parking lot and pulled on some jeans and a hoodie from the laundry basket in the back seat before heading to the fruit stand. Somewhere in the sky, a dramatic baritone voice said "She's the epitome of class. Yes, she is."

And that was the story of how I started to make this dish, a recipe from a sleep-walking recipe search (or something along that line) and the chickpeas from a randomly classy act on the I-80.

Winner Winner Cookie Dinner

The winning day is here! I entered your comments in a random generator and it came out with...
...
...
drum roll, please...
Winners:

1. Adorably Dead
2. Helen Lam
3. Carrie


Since I know where Helen and Carrie live, I'll go have an awkward conversation with them. Adorably Dead, please email me at altoidsnation[at]gmail[dot]com so I can get your address.

However, since the entry pool was so small, I decided to just get cookies to everyone! Yay! But, you other guys won't be getting 12 cookies, though. Maybe a few to munch on.

Hoorah!

Epic Pizza

I have a confession. It's a serious one. I cannot make anything bread related. That includes: bread, sweet bread, pizza dough, buns, etc. To make pizza, I have to rely on Trader Joe's ready made dough. For this exercise, I did not make my own dough. But if your name is not LeTran and your online persona does not have the name The Chopping Block, you should check out Helen's pizza dough recipe because Helen is awesome since she can make bread and stuff.

So my boyfriend and I decided to make an epic pizza. He called it a shit show pizza but epic sounds way better.

Celebrations!

Photo stolen from my sister.


Folks! I have a few reasons for celebrating:

1. I'm done with finals! And guess what? I'm not taking summer school!
2. Summer is here! The temperature in San Francisco is above 68 degrees.
3. My allergies aren't bad at all this year.
4. I feel great!

What to do with all this free time and good weather? I actually have a long long long list of all the things I want to do. So what do I want to do first? I'll tell you via a proposal.

Proposal:
I avoided a lot of friends and people during the time that I was taking classes. Now that classes are done, I'm crawling out into the sunlight with my great white pasty skin, saying "Friends? Where have you all gone?" In an effort to look for old friends and new ones, I want to bake cookies.

If anyone who reads this blog would post a comment on some of your plans for this summer, I'll use a random generator to pick 3 people. Then I'll bake each of the "chosen ones" a dozen of chocolate chip cookies and mail them to the "chosen ones." Just to be clear, that will be a total of 36 cookies (12 x 3), not a total of 12 cookies (4 x 3).

So, what are your summer plans? Be it something huge like "I'm going to buy an island and make myself king" or something tiny like "I'll learn to bake bread," just tell me!

The TL;DR version:

1. Comment about your summer plan
2. 3 comment monkeys will get chosen randomly
3. Each chosen comment monkey gets 12 chocolate chip cookies
4. END DATE for commenting: TUESDAY, 5/15/12 AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT!!!

Hack 1: Be the only one commenting, that way you'll get all 36 cookies.
Hack 2: Live in the Bay Area. I'll deliver it to you in person and we can have an awkward conversation.


I repeat myself a lot.

Velvet Pork Stir Fry

My boyfriend asked me if know how to velvet meat. The answer to that question was "No, who do you think I am? Some kind of fancy pants chef?" Nevertheless, it isn't a bad idea to learn to velvet meat, so I looked it up. I got this recipe from Serious Eats.

Oatmeal Lemon Blueberry Scones

If you want to impress people, make them scones. They won't know how easy it actually is! Biscuits and scones are pretty easy, believe it or not. Making biscuits from scratch, from start to finish (minus the baking time) takes about 10 minutes. Scones take a little bit more time, but it's totally worth it if you want to eat a bunch of scones.

Red (Kidney) Beans & Rice

My neighbor, Chris, gave me his mom's "Red Beans and Rice" recipe back in November 2011. I've made it a few times since then, and I've altered it to my liking, but I put the original recipe (that Chris sent me) at the bottom of the post.

Cloth & Dagger

Hi guys! I'm hijacking The Saucy Choppers to plug in a project that I've been working on.

clothanddagger.com



That's all! I hope you guys are having a great weekend!

Beef and Broccoli

I've been super busy with work lately, and haven't really had time to cook elaborate fancy-pants meals. But lucky for you, that means this recipe will be really simple. Yay. I've been making a lot of beef and broccoli because it is seriously the easiest thing in the world to make. The only think that might be hard is getting the Oyster sauce if you don't have access to an Asian grocer.