Photo of the day #9: Steamed mutton dumplings

One word: YUM.
These cabbage and goat meat dumplings are KICK ASS. I can seriously go on about them all day. They remind me of the ones you can get in this one little shop in XingJiang, with the dough skin super soft and moist, and the tender meat filling just dripping with juice. My mom made these today, as they are a childhood favorite, and I fell in love with these dumplings all over again. Who says mothers aren't good matchmakers?

BTW I'll be gone for the next 4 days on a trip, so stay tuned for more posts next week!

Banana Orange "Sunshine Smoothie"



I don't know about you, but I start longing for beaches and sunshine approximately 3.5 days after the first snowfall. Honestly, I am a tropical weather girl. In my perfect world, 1 week of fluffy light snowfall a year (ideal for skiing!) is enough. Fall is romantic and summer is bright, but winter and spring are just cold, slogging affairs that drag on and on and on. Plus the weather outside today is gloomy and dark, a strangely wet day for the beginning of winter.

So as another pick-me-up (I seem to require a lot of those lately) I made myself a banana-orange smoothie, also largely due to the fact that bananas and oranges are the only fresh tropical fruits I have on hand right now.

RECIPE:

*1 ripe banana, roughly sliced

*1/2 cup milk

*Juice of 1/2 a fresh orange

*3-4 ice cubes

PREPERATION:

1.) Put everything in blender and blend on high for about 10-15 seconds.

2.) Garnish with wedge of orange if desired and serve.

Photo of the day #8: Hot soup on a Chilly day

"The weather outside is frightful, but inside, it's so delightful..."

It snowed today! Just a few virgin flakes of melting, icy blankness, but I really am happy about this since it gives me an excuse to pull out all the cold-weather comfort foods that are such familiar old friends.

I came home shivering today to this delicious soup, actually just a really chunky vegetable broth, which satisfied both my immediate need for warmth and my craving for soup.

Even though I'm generally sick of winter after the first two weeks and the pretty frosted ground has turned into two feet of gray, slogging, frozen snow, there are definitely times I appreciate having a warm beverage and relaxing with my family in the warm kitchen while a blizzard is raging outside.
I also feel like I'm getting a bit ahead of myself right now, seeing that it's only November and there's not even any legitament snow on the ground yet, but the holiday season is really starting to get to me.
I predict plenty of pumpkin and Thanksgiving recipes to come!

Photo of the day #7: Japanese tea cakes

One of my dad's business associates gave him these; mini cream-filled puffs that are supposed to be for "tea time". Delish, and super light and fluffy. Barely any sugar taste at all but quite good with a cup of heavy coffee.

Photo of the day #6: Cravings

I have a feeling this is because of my nostalgia for summer as much as my overall love for fresh produce, but lately all I've been craving is fruit! So please put up with all these random fruit photos.

Bananas:

Apples:

And one of my all-time favorites (though I'm pretty much in love with all fruit)

Asian pears! So crunchy and juicy.

Yup. Will try to post more regularly now that all the quarter testing craziness is over.





My mother's birthday story

Yesterday it was my mother's birthday, so I concocted a birthday cake for her that turned into a one-way guilt trip to heaven.
You see, the story goes like this:

I started out making a simple dark chocolate cake from the Hershey's "Perfectly Chocolate" Chocolate Cake recipe on the back of the box.

When I took it out of the oven, I couldn't resist having the tiniest sample.
It tasted rich, delicious, chocolatey, and not too sweet. Bafflingly, however, it stuck to my well-greased pan though the cake itself wasn't burnt at all, and when I tried to get it out, it crumbled. How sad it was, that all my efforts for my wonderful mother's birthday cake were seemingly wasted, as I had no more time to bake another cake.

Not to fear; I wasn't born a professor's daughter for nothing! I quickly decided that the heavenly mountain of crumbled cake could still be decorated quite appealingly. After all, cake must not be wasted. So I drizzled it with the chocolate frosting I had previously prepared, and then iced it with dollops and swirls of vanilla buttercream icing. I then added some extra color and seasonal flavor with organic cranberries that happened to be on hand.

Voila! Disaster averted, and not to mention my dad's diet plans were ruined. 

We then went out for dinner in the city at Jax Cafe, which is famous for their pork chops and steak. However, since the lighting was too dim to do justice for their tender and juicy steak, I just quickly snapped a few pictures of our appetizers to commemorate the special evening as well as my adolescent immaturity.(I apologize for the grainy shots; couldn't fit a bulky camera into my purse so these were taken with my ipod.)



Check out my artistic skills as I attempt to give Simba a makeover




Bread basket! The raisin bread was really nice, a perfect balance of fresh, doughy, whole wheat bread and sweet dried fruit




Really nicely made fresh pita bread and different types of hummus dips.
The orange dip was definitely my fave, with what I swear was a note of cumin and a bit of spiciness from the paprika, as compared to the more generic and slightly salty regular hummus dip.

Moment later, as my famished family dug in...


...

Everyone in my family except for the (more prudent) me was full before the main course!

Tomato Basil soup. Very seasonal and fresh, but a bit too salty.

Quick random excerpt from today: After having an extra guilty helping of leftover cake this afternoon, I had a major sugar rush and was itching to play a game of tennis (too bad the season's over and there's no one to play with me right now anyways) but I went on a nice long jog/walk with my dog instead and spared my mom an hour of having to deal with a super jittery, sugar-hyped teenager. That's my good deed for the day.

Second trip to the fair!

Got a boatload of pics this time of my trip to the state fair with my kick-ass family! Please excuse all the exclamation mark as I just downed like 10 brownies after coming home from a good game of tennis and all that sugar is just buzzing in my system...
Anyways, enjoy!




Fried Bologna on a stick! Split this with my little bro. You've gotta start off with something to eat, right? The excess of oil and sodium made it taste great, but when it cooled it tasted like spam. Kinda like most fried foods at the fair...

Crab fritters stuffed with chopped veggies, crab meat, and egg, deep-fried in batter, then served with some SouthWestern sauce. Really nice, and some real traditional home-style cooking.

Something sweet! A frozen banana dipped in chocolate. And just to inform y'all out there, the reason I'm not clinically obese yet is due to the fact that I take nibbles of everything! So pretty much all the food in the pictures were either split with someone else, or my brother or dad was eating it and I tortured them by making them pause to snap a pic. 

 

Visiting the animals

 A real horse's ass. Okay, I know it's immature, but pictures of animal butts still never fail to amuse me, so please bear with me through the next couple butt-shots.

 

Cows in a row

 

Okay last cow butt picture, I promise! When I was little I used to think that chocolate milk came from chocolate cows. Guess that fantasy still hasn't been broached. Wonder where strawberry milk would come from then, since I've never seen a pink cow before.

Anemic-looking sheep. I'm pretty sure it ate some lady's hat...

Another animal butt picture! I'm sorry, but I cannot stop myself from thinking of bacon every time I see a pig. And yes, I realize the irony of posting farm animals that are very butcher-ready when I am such a carnivore.

Wilbur from Charlotte's Web, anybody?

Cutest little piglet! Only 13 days old... (And in my sick mind: not yet fully formed pork tenderloin.)

I milked a goat! It wasn't even mildly scary, as goats seem to be such stubborn and interesting creatures that we actually get along very well. Visions of Heidi drift in my mind.

Chicken Einstein

Placid-looking goose.

Ginormous turkey leg the size of my arm. And though I have short arms, let me tell ya; that's a big-ass turkey leg! Kinda felt guilty about eating it though after just seeing all those turkeys in the fowl building.

 Said turkey leg about 10 minutes later, gnawed clean by the combined efforts of me, my dad, and my brother.

Brisket sandwich for my brother, ordered at my fave southern-style food stand. Really greasy and flavorful, with the gravy soaked into it and the meat just coming apart in your mouth.

Ice cream machine from 1939

Refreshing strawberry ice cream freshly made from that machine

Ketchup and Mustard flavored lip balm! They handed them out for free somewhere in the fair, and I got super-obsessed trying to mix the two into the perfect orangey combo. The ketchup tastes more marinara sauce-like and almost cherry-ish, but the mustard was full-on mustard! Very interesting when I mixed the ketchup with my other french-fry flavored lip balm.

And that's the end of my state fair adventure! Until next year!



Old friends from your hometown

The parents of one of my dad's students (yes that is a long title) was invited over to my parent's house on Saturday night for a delightful dinner after my mom had a bout of homesickness and found out that the couple was from my dad's hometown, Wulumuqi, in the Xingjiang province of China. (My mom's hometown is about 4 hours away from there.) The couple was charming, and it turned out to be a delightful evening. We had a western-style dinner cooked and served in Chinese style, because Mom didn't think her humble home cooking could match up to the delicious and sometimes elaborate typical fare that the guests ate in China.



Steamed broccoli with crushed garlic, dried shrimp, and olive oil; an everyday food that looks great, tastes wonderful, and easy and quickto make! I've got to post this recipe sometime.

Shrimp sweetly marinated in soy sauce- this dinner had a strong resemblance to traditional Maine food.

Close-up shot of shrimp! Could not resist... so golden and yummy

Sticky rice studded with peanuts, dates, mushrooms, and chicken, on a bed of dried bamboo leaves. Southeastern asia- inspired cooking from the years our family resided in Singapore.

Mashed potatoes with corn and rosemary, plus a hint of ground cumin powder. Perfect East-West hybrid dish!

Not too much to say about the lobster- freshly killed the day before, this was simply frozen and then steamed.

And last but not least- all-american, fresh-off-the-grill, T-bone steak. Perfect. God, I love having a father who possesses such great grilling abilities (not that he does much other cooking.)

Finishing off the meal with some luscious dark chocolate Belgian truffles (I just might snitch a few- heads up, Mom) and many stories of China, we were all satisfied and happy. Gorgeous night!