Pumpkin and Shrimp Bisque

There is nothing more welcoming than a bowl of warm soup on a cold day. This soup is that soup. However you will encounter some unpleasant, fishy smells because you have to roast the shrimp shells. I felt slightly crazy cooking shells, but it turned out delicious so I'll do it again if I need to. I also felt a lot of asian guilt at having to throw out the onion and celery (though I did eat a few spoonfuls, but gave up after getting too many shell bits). Work through the guilt and make this soup. It is good and very easy.

Shrimp shells, it's whats for dinner.

I think I'm getting better at choosing wines to cook with- thanks to all the friendly folks at Trader Joe's. (PS: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!)

Bacon-wrapped Hot Dogs and Pickled Red Onions

If you haven't had a bacon-wrapped hot dog yet and you live in LA, you are missing out. My love of BWHD's (bacon wrapped hot dogs) was revived at a UCLA football game where I succumbed to the bacon aroma wafting from the various vendors outside the stadium. I was a little iffy about what kind of hot dogs and bacon they use so I decided to make my own (also they were charging $4 for one).



I also spiced it up a little by pickling red onions. I really like the idea of canning, jamming and pickling food, but I am also hooked by my overactive imagination and 20/20 specials on botulism. This is one baby step towards becoming a canning/jamming/pickling superstar. Also this was an excuse to get some pickling/mason jars, which I love so very much. The pickled red onions sparked the pickle-love in my roommate Jer and now there are ample supplies of pickled onions in our fridge, at all times. I pickled mine for about 2 days and at that point they were 70% rice wine vinegar and only 30% onion-y so I drained the pickling juice and replaced it with water.


And to make this worthy of a blog post, I made my own hot dog buns. This was surprisingly easy- it was no baguette. It's basically white bread dough shaped into hot dog bugs. They were tasty, especially when lightly brushed with some bacon fat. And yes you will have more hot dogs buns than hot dogs, but they were tasty on their own for sandwiches.


Ok, hopefully you know how to cook a hot dog? Wrap a nice thick cut of bacon around the hot dog, overlap a bit. I had to stick a toothpick in both ends of the bacon to keep it on the dog, but I pulled them out after it cooked for a bit so I could get all of the bacon fat rendered out. I prefer my BWHD closer to burnt so I cooked mine til they were very, very crispy. Also I made this on my ridged cast iron skillet so it was a little bit closer to being grilled. This also prevented the hot dog from being deep fried in bacon fat (too much bacon already).

BWHD + pickled red onions = SUCCESS

Cinnamon rolls

There was a time a few years back when I was as obsessed with cinnamon rolls as I am with pizza now. I went through a LOT of recipes and variations and then got sick of them. I found this recipe while perusing the cooking light website.


The previous recipes I've used make gigantic rolls, but this made 18 smaller-than-your-palm ones. They tasted okay up to the second day after I made them, after that they were lethal weapons.

Butternut squash and bacon pasta

Another baked pasta recipe, this time with SQUASH! Again, it's from cooking light even though it has a lot of bacon, but at least there's no cream. This dish is really filling and heavy- definitely invite some friends to share it. The shallots were really good, glad I made the drive to Ralphs to find it.

And if you happen to live near a World Market, pick up some animal shaped pasta. Not only will your pasta be delicious, it will also be cute.

Chicken Tikka

My first foray into Indian food. My knowledge of Indian food starts and stop with whatever is served on the India Jones food truck and the Dosa truck and... curry. I know curry is Indian... and there's frequently a yogurt sauce?? I really have no idea so this is my way of venturing out to untested waters and trying different food.

new spices!

I had chicken tikka marsala on campus when I had lunch with my boss. It was amazing and although I found a lot of recipes online I thought I'd start with this simple recipe for chicken tikka so I wouldn't have to make a sauce. It's awesome, but 1) I am scared of raw chicken so I overcooked these (aka they were dry) and 2) I had to buy a lot of new spices. I guess this means I'll be making more Indian food because I don't want to waste all those spices.

Perfect chocolate chip cookies

Another great recipe from America's Test Kitchen. These cookies are perfect because there is a freakish amount of butter in these and I am not normally shocked by butter, but this is like 1.5 tablespoons of butter per cookie. EH I'd like to live to 50 at least so I took out 2 tablespoons of butter, substituted whole wheat flour for 1/3 of the total flour and added some more flax seed. Verdict? Delicious- probably because of brown butter. I love brown butter, it smells amazing.

look how shiny the batter is!

Artichoke and Parmesan Risotto

This artichoke and parmesan risotto is a great fall/winter food, incredibly rich and comforting. Except now that I don't have 5 roommates I was forced to eat this for lunch AND dinner for 3 days straight and it was no longer comforting or even good by the third day. so please... make half or find someone to share it with.


I <3 artichokes and I'm starting to like white wine! I don't remember what I bought- I read all the labels at Trader Joe's and chose one that said it was light and went well with pasta.... thank you Trader Joe's -you never do me wrong.

A pizza dough fail.

Yes, broccoli. It was about to go bad and I had to eat it.

Another pizza dough recipe. And this one was a big fail, I don't know why! Maybe my yeast was dead? But this dough did NOT want to be kneaded or be anything other than a chunk of cold, wet dough. I persevered and made one pizza, but I ended up trashing the other two balls of dough. It was sad day in pizza land.

Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

This recipe can be found on the box of Quaker Oats' oats. They are really good and truly, vanishing. I used a few tablespoons less butter, used 1/3 whole wheat flour and added some ground flax seed to make up for all the junk we've been eating and they tasted the same. Amazing. They are awesome.



I made these for a cookie delivery to my friends in Ohio along with brown butter chocolate chip cookies and snickerdoodles. I'll post the recipe for the brown butter chocolate chip cookies later- they were buttertastic.

Spiced Pumpkin Bread

The Santa Ana winds are back and that means it's officially Fall/Winter here in Los Angeles, which also means it's time for pumpkin! I love pumpkin, but it feels wrong to eat it at any other time. This recipe for spiced pumpkin bread is reallyyyyyy good. It makes two small loaves, but of course because I'm impatient I crammed it into one loaf pan making for a really big loaf. I had to cut the top off when it started getting a wee bit burnt while the inside was still mush. Good thing Ilya likes crusty/burnt bread. Although this isn't bread, it's just a big frosting-less cake.



The before: the pan overfilleth with pumpkin bread. Do not do this unless you want to cut the top crust off and have burnt edges.

Chorizo and Potato Tacos

Unfortunately, no photos of the finished product because I packed this up for lunch. This recipe is from Real Simple, one of my favorite magazines. It's only rated 2 stars on the website, but I thought it was a pretty good recipe. I got chorizo from my neighborhood Sprouts, also another favorite. They sell "bulk" chorizo, spicy italian sausage without the casings in the meat section and it ranges from 1 lb to 2lbs so it's great for small recipes like this.



I made the radish, black bean salsa the day before and added some avocado and sour cream to the mix. Tasty- although I pretty much like anything with chorizo and black beans.

Thomas Keller Oreos

Another recipe from Thomas Keller. This time it's his version of an oreo. I didn't have a fluted pastry cutter so I ended up using an old plastic wine glass I had, which worked out pretty well. The shortbread is salty- so good with the white chocolate cream. I had an issue with the white chocolate being too viscous so I let it rest in the fridge for a day instead of the 6 hours and that seemed to solve it. Also thank goodness the blogger mentioned that the dough will at first look like sand because it did and I wasn't sure if I was making it correctly. But just keep mixing and it will eventually come together.

Ginger Pork Meatballs

First of all, this recipe is from Cooking Light, which I am going to visit more often now because these meatballs are delicious and in no way dry. I can't believe they're healthy- how bizarre! They are much much better tasting than any turkey meatball I've made because there is so much flavor in these (ginger, cilanto, onion, soy sauce). Easy to make and cook, very very tasty.

Roasted Tomato Soup

This recipe for a roasted tomato soup comes from Gordon Ramsey. It is sublime. I chose the best looking organic heirloom tomatoes from Trader Joe's and stuck them in the oven with onions and garlic... the kitchen smelled amazing. Roasting is my go-to preparation for almost everything. It takes little effort and it's difficult to mess up. Just cut up the vegetables, toss with some olive oil and garlic and stick them in the oven for awhile. Shake the pan every once in awhile and take it out once it browns or softens. Easy!

My favorite way to prepare cauliflower is to cut it up and roast it with garlic, olive oil and sea salt. The cauliflower gets brown and crisp at the bottom and soft and garlicy everywhere else. This was another great tomato soup! I'm really glad I decided to give tomato soup another try because otherwise I never would've found out how much I love it.

Post roast vegetables.

Broccoli Garlic Quiche (round 2)

Round 2 with the Broccoli Garlic Quiche (originally from this post). Last time, I didn't do a very good job with the crust- I didn't roll it out large enough and when I blind baked it, I didn't have enough beans so the sides slid down a bit. This time I nailed the dough and it was awesome- thanks to my ceramic pie weights (yay!). But... of course my crazy oven went up and down 50 degrees so it came out to be more of an omelette with a pie crust than a quiche.

It was still good though, but it wasn't as fluffy or soft as it was supposed to be. It was definitely more than enough cream and butter for a month.

Potato Gnocchi (the 101st? post!)

I had gnocchi for the first time ever while volunteering at Food Rendevous, a great meeting of local food. A chef was demo-ing potato gnocchi and how easy it was to make and I tried some- omgggaahhhhh it was so good. It still had bits of mashed potatoes in it so it was soft, not at all what I thought it would taste like. I've avoided gnocchi for so long because I thought they were going to be chewy lumps of dough- that's definitely not the case! This recipe is great- the gnocchi were tender and had a very faint hint of potato.


I also got to use a potato ricer for the first time and I am now a converted ricer-lover. It make the potatoes so fluffy! This recipe was somewhat labor intensive, I spent just under an hour rolling and cutting the gnocchi. I youtube'd a lot of videos on how to properly roll a gnocchi on a fork... I think they came out more or less looking like proper gnocchi.

I served mine with a meat sauce (Trader Joe's spicy Italian sausage!) YUM! This would be perfect for the rainy weather in socal right now.

Chocolate Raspberry Cake and Honey Lavender Ice Cream

the elusive organic lavender

I had dinner at Fraiche a few months ago and the food was very good, but the dessert was mind blowing-amazing-awesome. I had a scoop of honey lavender ice cream- I picked it spontaneously. This ice cream tasted like a savory, subtle honey ice cream infused with flowers. It was so good- almost savory. I thought about that ice cream for a very long time and I found this recipe and made it and guess what... it tastes exactly the same!!! It took me 3 trips to different Whole Foods and Ralphs' to finally find some organic edible lavender, but it was worth it. SO WORTH IT.



And I made a huge chocolate cake. I didn't have raspberry jam so I used strawberry and it turned out pretty well (although I should really listen

Thomas Kellers' Simple Roast Chicken

Look at that crispy skin! I did it!

This post encompasses everything that this blog is for me: pushing my culinary boundaries. I had to stick my hand in a chicken! I don't know if it's evident in my posts, but I typically do not enjoy sticking my hand in dead animals. When I cook meat it's normally cut up already and all I have to do is open the package and dump it directly into the pan. I rarely marinate as that would require me to handle meat. I am terrified of germs/making someone sick and also very sad about the animal that died so I don't eat meat that much. BUT I love burgers and medium rare steaks so I'm not so animal friendly that I won't eat them, I'm just scared of them. But I forced myself to make this- every good cook should know how to make a roast chicken!

TK recommends slathering butter on the chicken as you eat it, but I felt that was unnecessary- I'm already cooking potatoes in chicken fat, do I really need to add butter?

I chose this recipe because
a) It's from Thomas Keller
b) It is really easy

And it was really easy! I kept checking the oven because it seemed too good to be true, but the chicken turned out juicy (without butter somehow) and the skin was so crisp (don't know how that happens).

I tried to be eco-friendly and bought a reusable silicone string to make up for all the paper towels I used to dry the chicken.

Oh and by the way, when you buy a whole chicken, it comes with it's NECK. aaahhhhhhhhh I was frozen for a few minutes and then started yelling NECK NECK MY CHICKEN HAS A NECK until my roommate yelled back to just cut it off and make some chicken stock. Ah thank goodness for Jer and his good sense. And this recipe does require you to use a lot of paper towels because you have to thoroughly dry the chicken.

Watermelon Sorbet

My roommates and I wanted to make some watermelon sorbet before watermelon season ended and I picked up one from the farmer's market. This was my first time making sorbet and something went wrong. I ended up with basically a giant watermelon ice cube. Did I add too much water?? I have no idea what went wrong.... I'll have to try again.

Look at all the watermelon pulp left!!

It froze so hard that you can't even scoop it, just shave off thin slivers at a time.

Baked Eggs with Polenta

This recipe for baked eggs is a mash up of this recipe and this recipe. I basically had a lot of eggs to get rid of and a tiny bit of cornmeal and tomato sauce that I wanted to use so I looked to these two recipes for guidance. Also, do you see that tiny baby basil leaf? I GREW IT FROM A SEED!!!!! YAAYYYY The leaves are all about that size, I hope it experiences a growth spurt soon.

This is a super easy and surprisingly filling dish- the polenta + egg is enough for a meal if you have some veggies on the side. I roasted some cauliflower and garlic while the eggs were cooking. I was still a wee bit scared of salmonella because I made this a few weeks ago so I cooked it until the yolks were just about solid, but this has great potential to be accompanied by bread to soak up the yolk + sauce. Yum.

Various herbs from my sad balcony garden (chives, rosemary, basil) + polenta.

Dab of tomato sauce.

Egg! (Not shown is the bread crumbs + parmesan I later added on top)