Last night I made a tasty, tasty dinner.  It was from a box.  GASP!  Crazy, I know!  Anyway, while going through the grocery store I noticed these Asian boxed dinners called Wanchai Ferry.  It was in a cool shaped box and said "just add chicken." The picture on the box looked yummy and I figured, for $4, if it was horrible, so be it.  I picked the Spicy Garlic Chicken.



Inside the box was a can of water chestnuts and bamboo shoots, a packet of seasoned cornstarch, a packet of jasmine rice and a baggie of sauce. 

I put the rice in a pot with water.  I cut up chicken tenderloins into 1" cubes and shook them up with the cornstarch.  Then the chicken was sauteed in a little olive oil.  When it was cooked through, the canned veggies and sauce were added. 

Easy peasy!

And, oh my gosh, WOW, it actually looked and tasted great!  I was shocked.  I checked the nutritional information and it's not even horrible for you.  It wasn't nearly as high in sodium as other prepackaged foods.  

I gotta get some more.  We don't have chinese delivery out in the farmlands.

I feel like perhaps I have done this before? 

Below is a list of 100 things that every omnivore should try at least once. Some of these things are pretty tame, others…well…not so much. l

Here are the instructions if you’d like to participate:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

The Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho  ------> but next time I'm in NJ, I am totally going for it
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream

( the rest )

My friend, Amy, who lives in Staten Island asked if we were going to be available to get together over the holidays.  We made plans to get together on Tuesday night to go out to dinner.  She suggested going out to a Vietnamese restaurant and said I'd never want "pedestrian Chinese" again and that some nights she wakes up in the middle of the night craving crispy squid from this particular restaurant. 

I am a fairly adventurous eater but I was a little nervous.  Wayne and I are continuing our World Tour of Food and neither of us had ever had Vietnamese before.  We agreed to meet Amy at Pho Mac at seven o'clock.

We arrived a little early, before Amy, and weren't sure what to make of the unassuming strip-mall restaurant.  From the front porch, we could see that they weren't very busy but they were very, very clean.  As we stood there waiting, several groups of people went in, many of them Vietnamese.  It's always a good sign for an ethnic restaurant when people of that ethnic group actually eat there.  We were starting to get really excited when Amy arrived.  The food on the tables we passed as we walked to the host desk looked and smelled amazing.  The owner greeted Amy in recognition and we asked to be seated on the second floor.

The dining room was narrow and all of the booths were separated by bamboo screens.  At the back end of each table was an organizer holding various hot sauces, small condiment bowls and Asian spoons.  Amy looked over the paper, takeout style menu and described the dishes she'd eaten on previous trips.  She said we'd order a variety of items, split them all and that the kitchen would bring them out as they were ready.

The first thing that came out was the order of crispy spring rolls.  Along with the rolls came a plate with leaf lettuce, fresh mint and fresh cilantro.  On the side was a clear dipping sauce with very fine threads of carrot and some white vegetable, perhaps daikon.  It was slightly sweet and slightly tart and I loved it.  Amy showed us how to wrap the spring roll up in a lettuce leaf with some mint and cilantro thrown in for good measure before dipping it.  The resulting crunchiness followed by the softness of the filling was incredibly delicious. 

Next was the crispy squid.  I like calamari, but only the rings.  I have a mental block against tentacles and I just can't bring myself to eat them, no matter how small they are.  I wasn't expecting that the crispy squid would be chunks cut from the top of the squid (what would be cut into rings in an Italian joint).  The pieces were small, lightly breaded, crispy on the outside and very tender to chew.  They were laid on a bed of lettuce with some lightly sauteed onions and peppers in a garlicky sauce and came with a small bowl of a sauce that had a tomato base but was also sweet enough to have included some red peppers.  I don't know what it actually was, but it was cold and tasty-- the perfect foil for the squid (and everything else on the table)!  

We had shrimp over sugar cane which was a formed minced shrimp patty that was grilled and laid over chunks of sugar cane.  It reminded me of the filling for shrimp toast, without the toast.  It was a little bland but still very good.  

There was some kind of grilled sliced pork over rice noodles: awesome.

 Crispy shrimp with salt & pepper was good but they were fried with the shells and legs on, just split down the back for cleaning and we weren't sure if it was intended that we eat them that way or if we were to peel them.  We peeled them and I think that much of the intended flavor was lost by discarding the shells but they were still perfectly cooked- tender and not rubbery with a little bite of pepper.

Our last dish was some sort of beef rolls.  These were like mini-bracioles-- thin pieces of beef wrapped around a meatloaf like mixture and fried.  The were yummy but unremarkable.

The crispy squid was so good we ordered a second plate. 

I don't know if I'm totally sworn off "pedestrian Chinese" but I was already searching to see if there is a Vietnamese restaurant here in Reading.

I don't have kitchen mishaps often but when I do, they are gigantic.

Tonight I decided I was baking cookies for Christmas and not the cookies that I've made every year since I could reach the knob on the oven myself, but NEW cookies. Different, pulled-off-the-interweb cookies.

HUGE mistake.

Huge.

So I was trying to make these gems I saw in a blog, that come from a recipe over at Epicurious:



I thought they were so colorful and pretty.

I made the dough and put it in the fridge to chill. Wayne brushed the logs with egg wash and coated the sides in RED decorating sugar. He sliced them and put them on the cookie sheet. What came out was not pretty.

( Pink? The red sugar turned pink?  )

I can't help their appearance but they also were screwed up in the taste department too. Why? Because the pistachios I had in house were these awesome salt and pepper pistachios that we got at Costco. I forgot that they had garlic powder on them too. So in addition to being really ugly and pink rimmed, like some diseased cyst, they tasted off cranberry and garlic. Just sooooo not good on many levels.

I just finished off an amazing plate of my Abuela's tomato salad.  It's a remarkably simple thing, like many great foods are, composed simply of thinly sliced ripe tomatoes, thinly sliced sweet onions and a light drizzle of good olive oil and red wine vinegar spread out over a large platter.  I like it salted with kosher or sea salt that doesn't quite all dissolve on the tomatoes.

I cut the first slice into a bite sized  piece and the second it touched my tongue, I was back at my grandmother's lunch table in the courtyard of her house in Spain. 

I could see the faces of my cousins sitting around me and the scratchiness of the orange and brown tablecloth she always put on the table against my knees.  I remember the angle of the sun and the way it looked shining through the grape leaves in the vineyard beyond the chicken coop.   We sat there every afternoon, on a hodge podge collection of mismatched chairs and stools, under the eaves of the out building where my Abuela had her summer kitchen. 

After the salad there was usually a fish dish or some meat that I didn't pay much attention to because I wasn't interested.  For three or four summers, this tomato salad was my lunch every day.  I'd also eat fresh fried potatoes and these tiny green peppers that were fried until they were almost black and then liberally salted.  The bread that was delivered to the house every other day was the best bread I've ever eaten-- crusty but moist on the inside with a strong wheaty taste, not the insipid white bread with soft crust that I can get here.  After all of the tomatoes were gone I'd tear off huge chunks of the break and sop up the vinaigrette and tomato juice, leaving my plate wiped clean.  

Some of my cousins spoke rusty English and my grandmother spoke none at all but we still managed to communicate with each other.  My uncle Fernando, the English teacher, would sometimes translate for me if he was around.  She knew I loved that tomato salad and  it always reminds me of those summers in Spain, where wild blackberries grown on thorny bushes along the roadside.

I wish I had taken more pictures of the little village the last time I was there, the stone farm buildings that had been there for hundreds of years; the orreyos, big elevated stone buildings used to dry corn; the Carregal, a low marshy area that's flooded when the tide comes in; the Dunas, the local beach surrounded by sand dunes. 

Now I'm longing to go back.  I haven't walked those roads since 1991 and it's time to think about going back.  All because of a tomato salad.

On Monday afternoon Wayne and I went to the Kutztown Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival.  What a blast!  We ate from one end of the fair to the other, starting with a roast beef sandwich sliced from a whole cow cooked on a spit.  So when I saw "cow on a stick," I don't mean a skewered slice of beef, I mean a gigantic cow, run through with a metal pole, hoisted over a fire and roasted for TWENTY HOURS.  It was incredibly tasty and the only food at the festival that we didn't share--for this one, we each got our own and then seriously considered getting a second one.  We also ate a flowering onion, a fresh pickle on a stick, a pork lollypop (hunk of smoked pork tenderloin on a stick), a fresh strawberry shortcake made by little old church ladies and some kettle corn made in a big, black, witch-type cauldron.  Yummy.  We both left feeling slightly queasy and still wondering if we passed up anything we should have had. 

Also at the fair I got a real corn broom, made by a nice lady who understood how annoyed I get when as I was sweeping with my grocery store straw broom, the handle would unscrew itself because I sweep left handed.  So on my new (red handled!!!) broom, the straw is attached directly to the handle so now screwing or unscrewing.  I am so excited!  At another stand I got a really pretty dip crock.  I'd never seen one of these until I moved out here.  It's a deep stoneware crock that you fill with ice and water and then there's a shallow bowl that fits on top that you fill with dip and it stays cold.


This picture is actually from the website of the people who sold it to me.  Mine has the red rim but has a really pretty bunch of grapes with leaves and curly vines on it.  (I have a fruit theme in my kitchen.)  They had all sorts of really cute designs.  I came very close to a cute blue one with an adorable orange crab on it but it seemed too "New England" for central PA.  I also bought several of their dip mixes.  The cool thing about them is that they're hand mixed and salt free so if sodium is a concern, you salt to taste.  We made the Santa Fe dip on Tuesday and ate it with pretzel crackers.  It worked.  The dip and the crock stayed really really cold.

The festival only runs from 9 am til 6 pm (strange if you ask me... don't most people work til 5?)  so afterwards, we were looking for something to do.

I wanted to get an official fish bowl for Jesus, my new goldfish from the Apple Dumpling Festival.  (He's the only one of the three that's still alive and his name is pronounced HAY-seuss.) We walked around Pet Smart looking at big aquariums and stands and reiterated that we'd like to have a big tropical/salt water aquarium at some point.  Pet Smart seemed to be a little overpriced so we went to Petco where instead of a goldfish bowl we bought a 10-gallon aquarium kit, gravel, a decorative rock and a companion fish for Jesus. 

Phantom is a white-bodied fantial goldfish with some orange and black spots.  The coolest thing about Phantom though is that she has one black eye and one white.  It's pretty cute.  Jesus is your standard common goldfish but he's still my buddy, even if he's "common." At some point, I will take pictures of my fishie babies.

Something I just made up and pulled out of the oven. I wanted to use up some of the stuff leftover from the luau. It's a variation on your standard Pineapple Upside Down Cake.

Ingredients:
Base:
1 stick butter or margarine or a little of both (what I used)
1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
Enough pineapple slices or chunks to cover the bottom of an ovenproof 12" skillet
maraschino cherries


Cake
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup Cream of Coconut (Coco Lopez)
1/2 cup shredded coconut

Preparation:
In 12" ovenproof skillet, melt butter/margarine over medium heat. Sprinkle brown sugar over the top and stir until it's all dissolved and you have a nice caramel. Remove from heat and arrange pineapple and cherries in the pan, in the syrup, making a design.

To make the cake batter.
Cream 1/2 cup butter on medium speed with mixer; gradually add 1/2 cup sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Add egg and beat well.

Add cream of coconut to milk and stir to combine. In a separate bowl, sift all of the dry ingredients except coconut. Add sifted ingredients alternately with the milk; beat until smooth, ending with dry ingredients. Add coconut and stir to combine.

Pour over pineapple design. Bake at 375° for about 35 minutes. Let cake cool for about 5 minutes before turning out onto a serving plate.

Last night I made the most tasty casserole out of all the leftover bits and pieces hiding in my fridge.

It started with 3 packages of Chicken flavored Lipton noodle side dish.   I was going to make it according to the package directions and then I realized I was out of milk.  So I just left out the milk.  I figured that was going to be the base of the casserole. 

I sauteed some leftover chopped onion from the centers of the Vidalia onion rings I made on Friday night. and added some leftover peas and broccoli out of the fridge.  It was all a little too green and yellow, so I put some baby carrots I found in the back of the fridge in my food processor and pulsed them a few times so I had carrot chunkies and I added those to the pan. 

I figured I was going to top the whole thing with breadcrumbs so I opened the pantry doors to make sure I had some and found an open box of spaghetti, about 2/3 of it gone.  So I broke the noodles into small pieces and added them to the Lipton mix. 

Once all the veggies were warm, I added them to the noodles.  I diced up three leftover chicken breasts that were in the fridge and tossed them in too. 

Since I didn't cook the noodles with milk, like the package called for, I added 3/4 of a container of sour cream that was open in the fridge.  I thought that might make it too tangy so I added 8 ounces of shredded sharp cheddar. 

Then, I wondered if the flavor of the noodle package was going to be enough to carry all that stuff and decided it wouldn't so I added a package of McCormick chicken seasoning (some cook in a bag thing) and a packet of Good Seasons Italian Dressing mix.

There were no breadcrumbs in the pantry, so I took a bag of croutons I had just bought the night before and threw those in the food processor to make my own damned seasoned breadcrumbs.  I spread the crumbs over the top of everything, which I poured into my Pampered Chef 13x9 stoneware baker and put that sucker in the oven for half an hour.

It was so darned good!  All the kids actually ate it and I'm eating a little right now.  Plus, there are no more leftovers in my fridge.  Woo hoo.

I've been having issues with food all winter.  I'm just bored with eating all the same meals and have been trying to work new things into my repertoire.   I've been going through my cookbooks and planning different meals.

Tonight's choice is Chicken-fried Steak with Gravy from my Semi-Homemade Cooking #2. 

Last week I made the Pork Roast with Sherry Cream Sauce from the same cookbook and that was great too because it was all done in the crock pot.



For lunch today I had the leftover "Old Clothes" that I made for dinner one night last week.  Ropa Vieja is a pretty traditional Cuban dish, named for the texture of the shredded beef and it's served with white rice or tostones (double-fried green plantain chips).  The recipe was from Daisy Martinez's cookbook.  She has a cooking show on PBS and everything that I've made out of this cookbook has been absolutely FABULOUS.  I highly recommend it if you have any interest in Latin American cooking. 

I've been taking photos of my little Aerogarden to monitor it's progress.  It's still recovering from Godzilla's Joey's attack on it's adorable little stalks a couple of weeks ago.  We lost one herb entirely (the dill) but it seems like the chives, purple basil and thyme are going to recover.  The Italian basil is going crazy- it's the tallest plant in the bunch.

Allelujah, I've been converted.  I bought the Louis Rich/Oscar Meyer turkey bacon and made it in the microwave for breakfast along with my oft discussed oatmeal.  I have to say it.  I want to say it.  

I liked the turkey bacon!

Preheat your oven to 375. 

In a mixing bowl, combine :
1 box of vanilla instant pudding
1 cup Bisquick baking mix
Cut in with a fork or a pastry blender 1/4 cup of shortening (Crisco)

In another bowl, lightly beat one egg and add 3 tablespoons of milk

Add egg mixture to pudding mixture.  If it's too dry, add a little more milk, 1 tablespoon at a time.

Add 1/2 cup of semisweet chocolate chips and stir to combine. 

The recipe says to drop the dough by rounded teaspoon onto an ungreased cookie sheet-- this will make bite-sized cookies.  I use a small scoop rather than a teaspoon so my cookies are 3 or 4 biters. 

Bake for 10-12 minutes.  Using scoop, yields about 18 cookies

These will not look like "regular" chocolate chip cookies.  They'll stay really poofy, they don't spread out.  When done they'll be high, rounded cookies with a yellowish color and a fluffy, cake-like interior.  They're much lighter than regular chocolate chip cookies.