新年快樂

I'm only one day behind, so I hardly call it late. (I still haven't finish posts from last month!) Lunar New Year came relatively early this year since there's still more than a week in January left. Normally, we have dinner at my parent's on New Year's Eve. This year, my brother had to go out of state for work that day so we gathered a day early. I also don't think my Dad wants to miss any of the football games that day since he's in charge of cooking at my house. (Boo... the 49ers lost.) Since we ended up at home, I thought it would be fun to make some dumplings. It's not a tradition for my family since we're not from the northern part of China, where eating dumplings around the New Year is more common. I do have fond memories of making dumplings at my aunt's place in Hong Kong while growing up. Everybody got together to make everything from the hot water dough to the pork filling. My brother and I would tried to guess who will eat more dumplings every time. While the dumplings are boiling away (never pan-fried, I don't think I've had a pot sticker until I moved to US), we would make a dipping sauce with almost everything you could find in the house. Sesame paste, Chinese BBQ sauce, hosin sauce, oyster sauce, ketchup, hot sauce (usually a few to pick from), sesame oil, soy sauce, and countless others. The point is to achieve the right balance of savory, sweet, sour and spiciness to your specific palate. Sadly, we haven't done that since we moved to US. It's definitely one of those fond childhood memory that I treasured and almost forgotten about until I started to type this out.

I got a dumpling press for $1.50 at a Japanese discount store for T to use. I'm not sure the almost 5 years old could quite handle folding them. We used store purchased dumpling wrappers. (I haven't worked up to making my own yet.) Filled with a little minced pork and vegetables and wet the edge with a little water.


Press together the mold tightly.


Open and take the dumpling out.


You get a perfect little dumpling every time!


I only got one of the dumpling mold. So I had to make mine without one. The ones on the left are from T and the ones on the right are mine.


We ended up eating them for lunch and dinner that day. Boil the ones I made in water and served with chicken broth and vegetables for lunch. The ones T made were pan-fried for dinner. No pictures on the pan fried ones, they got eaten too quickly around here.

Chocolate Chips Cookie Dough Cake

My niece turned 12 last month. Per the birthday girl's request, I made a cookie dough cake for her. My brother showed me a picture of one they found online. The one they showed me had a full layer of cookie dough in the center as filling, which I thought would be way too heavy (in terms of weight and taste). After a few more searches, I saw that it was not that unusual of a cake afterall and there are many variations of them out there. I settled on the idea to make small little cookie dough balls and incorporate that with the frosting in the middle. The yellow cake recipe is from CookWise by Shirley O. Corriher. The cookie dough recipe is the brown butter chocolate chip cookies from The America's Test Kitchen. I left out the eggs and use 1/2 cup less flour (if it's still too thick, add a little milk to get it to the dough consistency.)



My flickr stream shows that there are 100 views on this picture. There must be a lot of people interested in making a cookie dough cake? Maybe this will be the new cake flavor for 2012!

Candy Pretzel bits

I've seen versions of this on pinterest a few times and thought it would make a great project for T to do. I had T and my niece made them together. This is possibly the easily "cookie" that comes out of my kitchen. Get pretzels (square or circle ones) and line them on a baking sheet. Top each of the pretzel with a Kisses candy (we used cookies and cream here). Put the tray in the oven at about 230F for 4-5 minutes. Finally, push a M&M on each while the Kisses are still soft. That's it! I think we'll do it again and give them out for T's preschool class for the holidays.

Only Light

We took a quick weekend trip to Seattle last weekend. This is one of my favorite picture from the trip. It also reminded me to write down this little note.

Miss T designated us to do certain things for her. Chris somehow is the designated person to turn on lights for her when it gets dark in her room. Now, whenever T wants the light to be turn on, she calls out for her "only light" to do the job. =)

Kale Chips

(Sorry for the blurry picture.)

I've seen kale chips 'recipe' for a while now but have never gotten around to make them. Chris and I already enjoys kale (cooked, not raw though) so while the idea is interesting, there was no reason to try it either. Last week I got a beautiful bunch of kale from my CSA box and I know I've got to eat it today or they'll be wilted by tomorrow. Kale chips seemed like a good idea to snack away a bunch of kale. (I have a little too much food in my fridge right now.) A little time consuming to make with all the trays needed, but not complicated at all. Just clean and dry the leaves really well. Tear them into pieces (no stalk!) Toss with a little olive oil and salt. Place in single layer on baking sheet. Bake at 325F for about 15 minutes. The best part, the 4 years old who eats most vegetables except for green leaves loves them! That is reason enough to make them again.

Watermelon radish

I signed up for a farmshare CSA program a couple of months ago. I've tried a few different produce delivery service over the years and was never impressed since all the ones that actually delivers to where I live are more like a producer distributor rather than something more local. The quality and the variety of produces were not too impressive either. I kept looking though because I think it would be fun for Miss T to try some new food and save me a trip to the farmer's market every other week. Capay Valley Farmshare seems to be meeting my needs so far. While they don't deliver to my house, they do deliver to where Chris works. I do have to pick it up at his office on my way home, the box would slow him down a bit on his commute home on a bicycle. We got these watermelon radishes a few weeks back and I was surprised to learn that its origin trace back to China. The Chinese name is 心里美, "beauty in the heart". I ended up trying to make pickles with them since I'm not a huge fan of raw radishes. The pickles were okay, but my refrigerator smells like rotten food. (Miss T thought it looked very pretty but has no interest in eating it since she thinks it smells like garbage.) I may just have cook it like a daikon next time instead or something.

Backyard

Since I kinda forgot that I had a blog for a while, I didn't get to post the finished picture of the backyard. This was back when the work was just done, still looking all nice and neat. If I were to show you a picture of it now, there would be more weeds around. We are in process of trying to hire a gardener to keep up with the maintenance. We are not good at it and there are way too much work to do between the front and back yards.



This is the top part of our backyard. I asked for the landscaper to leave me some space to play with. This was what I started the beginning of the summer. Now I have a lot of weeds, a lemon tree, and a blueberry bush. I think when I finally get that gardner, that person will have to help me out of what to do. I didn't mind having some space to play with, but this is actually way too big. I'm thinking of maybe using half as a flower garden. The other half would be a combination of fruit tree/bush and vegetables/herbs. But, right now, wish me luck in finding a gardener soon!!