Fried Rice

I have been fighting a battle with fried rice for at least 10 years. I have tried numerous recipes and messed with numerous ingredients but have never been able to achieve the flavor of fried rice that is served up in Chinese restaurants. I think that I am finally coming close! I know that the big secret is having a super-hot wok, but I have a crappy electric range. This time, I preheated the wok and then added oil to the hot wok and let it heat up for awhile. The rice didn't stick and the flavor was almost right. The only thing missing was that the rice was a little too fresh and clumped.

Different Uses for Kitchen Gadgets

Although I love to cook, I can't say that I'm a big kitchen gadget person. I like nice kitchen stuff, but get annoyed at kitchen tools that have just one use. Kitchen gadgets should have to earn the space they take up. I feel like it's a waste of space to buy say, a strawberry huller, when it's just as easy to use a knife and is only used for strawberries. Recently, I learned of new ways to use the melon baller and the vegetable peeler, which in my mind, already earn their keep in the kitchen. There are lots of different types of melons to be balled and lots of different types of vegetables to be peeled! I made an apple pie the other day, and used the melon baller to core the apples. I found that idea somewhere on the Food Network website. It worked really well, and left more of the apple intact than doing it the old-fashioned way. I learned from my sister-in-law that the vegetable peeler is a great way to shave cheese. I hope these tips help!

Garlic Fest

There are two schools of thought on garlic. Some people view garlic as a crutch, while others think that you can never really over-garlic anything. Aside from eating garlic raw, I've never had anything that I thought was too garlicky. I love garlic. It's universal and appears in so many different types of cuisine. A week ago, I went to the H-Mart (Korean market) and bought already peeled whole cloves of garlic. It was awesome! Apparently, pressing garlic takes away from the flavor, so ideally, it should be minced. I used to buy the jars of minced garlic, but it just doesn't taste the same as the fresh stuff. I then moved on to pressing because it doesn't require that the cloves be peeled. The peeled whole cloves are great because I can just throw a whole bunch in the mini food processor and have a ton of minced garlic in seconds. A warning, though. The peeled cloves make the whole fridge smell like garlic, so I'm trying to work on a way to contain the smell...

Better Than Bouillon

I highly recommend Better Than Bouillon. It's a concentrated base that can be substituted for bouillon. It's 95% organic and works like a charm. It has no artificial additivies like MSG, is fat free, and low in sodium. I've used the chicken version to make turkey noodle soup, and it turned out deliciously! Here's a very rough recipe: Ingredients Organic chicken stock Water Carrots Celery Cooked turkey Thin straight egg noodles Salt & Pepper Directions Combine chicken stock, water, carrots, celery, and cooked turkey. Heat on the stove. When liquid is hot, add better than bouillon, salt, and pepper to taste. When carrots have softened, add egg noodles.

Ice Cream Cake!!!!!

This is the inaugural picture for my blog! So, I usually don't write much about my own cooking, but I think that it's fun to mix things up occasionally. It was Eugene's birthday, so I made him his dream cake -- an ice cream cake with 3 layers of devil's food cake and chocolate mint chocolate ice cream. That's right, not mint chocolate chip ice cream, but chocolate ice cream flavored with mint with chocolate chips. I made the cake layers and the ice cream and frosting from scratch. I love making cakes and oftentimes consider quitting my day job to become a pastry chef. I hate mint chocolate chip ice cream or any kind of chocoalte chip ice cream that has hard chips. To solve the hard chip problem, I made a sturdy chocolate ganache and mixed little scoops of it in with the ice cream. It worked like a charm. The chocolate "chips" were nice and soft without being so soft as to be a fudge swirl. I also mixed in some York peppermint patties for good measure.

I used the devil's food cake recipe on the cake flour box, which I like a lot. I substituted some extra light olive oil for part of the butter for optimal moistness, and used Dutch process chocolate instead of the regular cocoa because I like dark chocolate better (and so does Eugene).

Once, I tried to make an ice cream cake, which ended in disaster. Despite being cool, the cake layers melted the ice cream. This time, I froze the cake layers overnight (before sandwiching the ice cream in) and was able to avoid the melting problem.

The cake is frosted with a Cool Whip/chocolate pudding cocoa frosting, which had a great consistency for the "cloud" effect that I was going for. It almost reminds me of chocolate cake batter in flavor. Yummy! It's also surprisingly durable. It doesn't melt if it sits out too long, and it does beautifully in the freezer.

I topped it off with some crushed candy cane which added a perfect crunchy finish to the cake.

Plain Vanilla?

When I started blogging a little over a month ago, I thought, "You know what? I'm not going to be snotty about food. I'm going to write about everything." Only kinda true now, I guess. For instance, I went to Noodles & Co. (you know, the fastish food noodle chain) for dinner, and I don't really feel inspired to write about it. I had been there before and thought it was so so. I went again tonight because it was nearby, open, and fit within our $15 per meal budget. At any rate, it was boring and mediocre, yet not expensive enough that I could become outraged that I ate there. Just a word to the wise, though, the pasta rosa (of the Mediterranean genre on the menu) tastes like warm vinegary pasta salad. On to more exciting things like plain vanilla. Except vanilla is not so plain. My theory on vanilla and baking is that there's always room for more than a recipe calls for. I always add extra, and I add it even if a recipe doesn't call for it. I put it in whipped cream etc. etc. It always makes things taste nicer. Is that the end of the story? Of course not! The type of vanilla you use can make a difference. Here is a WARNING for you unwary vanilla buyers out there. My friend took a trip to Mexico and bought me this wonderful bottle of Mexican vanilla that tasted and smelled like any other vanilla I had bought here in the states. It almost had a coconut scent to it. I thought, gee, I will go to Williams Sonoma and buy some expensive vanilla because it has a higher chance of tasting like the Mexican vanilla. WRONG!!! I bought Nielsen-Massey Madagascar Bourbon vanilla. Okay, so I probably couldn't have expected it to taste like the Mexican vanilla, because after all, Madagascar and Mexico are thousands of miles away from each other. I thought that the Madagascar vanilla might be exotic or different. Instead, it tasted just like the standard grocery store vanilla. It cost $8.50, which is probably not that bad for an 8 oz. bottle, but don't buy it thinking that it will taste special.