Grape Pizza Recipe

This pizza recipe looks like a great appetizer for the holiday party. How do you like it?? Click here to find the recipe.

Wild Rice Pilaf Recipe

This rice recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Baked Sweet Potatoes With Sour Cream and Brown Sugar

This sweet potato recipe is featured on the Martha Stewart Living Magazine November 1997 issue, how do you like it?

Five-Spice Salmon Fillets Recipe

We don't know why, we always dread about cooking fish. We love eating fish, steamed and cooked the way our mothers did when we were growing up. But we had never attempted cooking any fish here in America. One reason is, it's not easy to find a live fish to take home like our mothers do. We don't like frozen fish. Another reason is, we can't easily find the kind of whole fish here in America that are Chinese cooking friendly. We don't really like the meaty fish fillets available here if they are steamed in the Chinese way. So we just don't bother. One day, talking to our mothers long distance, complaining about how we were craving for the steamed live fishes they made for us almost everyday, our mothers told us to cure our fish craving by getting salmon and pan-fry it with soysauce and green onions. So we went get the fresh salmon fillets, $7.99 per pound. It's not really anything that is budget friendly for those who want to make a meal for $5 or less. But we needed the fish and we got to have it at all cost. When we were ready to cook the salmon like our mothers advised, we realized we forgot to buy green onions. Co-incidentally, one of us tumbled upon this salmon recipe that uses five-spice powder (we always have a bottle of five-spice powder in our pantry) with no green onion required. So we gave this American recipe a try. Wow, we totally loved it. The five spice powder makes the salmon taste incredibly delicious. This recipe is so easy and so short. It only requires so few ingredients. It's amazing how a simple recipe like this can churn out a great tasting dish within a very short time. We pair the salmon with baby green bak choys ($1.19 for a 1.5lb bag from a Chinese grocery store) and steamed rice. So the whole meal for 4 people costed may be about $10.00. So worth it, considering it's fresh, delicious and healthy meal for the skinny people like us!! We highly recommend it. Click here for the recipe from the Good Housekeeping website. You will see a comment there from someone who thinks the recipe makes the fish too salty and who dislikes the recipe. Don't listen to that cause we don't know how much salt and five-spice powder that user used. The amont of seasoning the recipe calls for to prep the 4 fillets, from our own experience, is just perfect. As far as five spice powder goes, we use the ones from Taiwan. We are sure the Mccommick brand also carries five spice powder that are widely available in regular American gorcery stores.

Cornflakes Chocolate Chips Cookies

Today is my last day at work before the Christmas holdiays begin. This means it's my last chance to give my co-workers their presents. Money is tight for me because I had spent too much money eating out in fancy restaurants (spent $80 for lunch just yesterday in Ivy in Beverly Hills and the food wasn't really that good) and buying cook books. In a desperation to save money, I found this cookie recipe on the internet and baked several dozens last night without much effort, packed them in boxes and just gave each of my fellow co-workers a box. They love them and are eating them at this moment with coffee. I'm relieved the Christmas gifting ordeal is officially over for this year. I don't cook much and am not good at cooking. So when I looked for cookie recipes, they have to be easy enough for me to do, and yet unique and special enough for me to make an effort to bake them at home. (or why bother, cause I can always buy the same old cookies from Costco) These cookies are just perfect cause I had never had chocolate chips cookies like these before, they have this special and flavorful crunch which makes the cookies more fun to chew on and a lot more tasty than the usual classics baked by everybody else.

Two-Tone Potato Wedges Recipe

This potato recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Christmas Clam Chowder Recipe

This clam chowder recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Cup Brownies With White Chocolate Pecan Frosting

We don't have sweet teeth because we were raised in a non-sweet Asian diet. We also never cared too much for sweet stuff because we want to maintain our 4 to 6 sizes. But these brownies are, at this moment of our lives, the best brownies we ever had, they are melt-in-the-mouth yummy treats that we couldn't stop eating. We baked 24 last-night and they were all gone! We were shocked that we could do this. We normally could only take one bite of the store bought brownie or restaurant baked brownie and we felt sick to the stomach already. But these brownies tasted so good, each of us could take in several and still wanted more. We didn't have any sick feeling. We now realize brownies made with natural ingredients and the right amount of real butter are much better than those made with artificial shortenings, or whatever it is that only one bite makes us feel nauseous already. We realize there is no point in using margerine or whatever butter substitute that don't nearly taste good but only give us a bloating stomach. Click here to see the recipe for these delightful brownies. Besides, why use margerine since butter had done no harm to us, we are still in sizes 4 to 6. The secret to our slim figures is, not to over eat on a daily basis...but do enjoy the real good stuff once in a full moon.

Oak Leaf Cookies

This cookie recipe is featured on the Martha Stewart Living Magazine November 1997 issue, how do you like it?

Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Turkey Meatloaf with Mushrooms and Herbs

This turkey meatloaf recipe is featured on the Bon Appetit Magazine October 2009 issue, how do you like it?
Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Macadamia-Crusted Tilapia Recipe

This tilapia recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Foodies Friendship Giveaway

We are giving away the above novel. When you decide to take a break from the kitchen to chill out in your porch or you want to pack that great lunch you just cooked up, to eat at a park, or by the beach, this book will be your great company.

A foodie winner will be picked by computer randomly on December 20th, 2009. Below are the rules for participation:

• You have a U.S. shipping address (we don't ship outside USA)


• Become our blog's follower.
  
• Put a comment on this post to express your desire to participate.
  

Good Luck.

Linguini With Italian Meatballs

This is the first time we make meatballs and we are thrilled to be able to skip the frying procedure that our mothers' recipes call for. These meatballs are totally delicious and moist. We love them so much and we are so definitely going to make a whole bunch of them in advance to make our weekday dinners preparation a tasty bliss! Click here to find the recipe.

Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Maple Walnut Rolls Recipe

This breakfast roll recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it? Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Smoked Salmon Tomato Pizza Recipe

This pizza recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Cream Cheese Cranberry Muffins Recipe

This muffin recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?
Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Ho-Ho-Ho Hummus-Topped Cucumbers Recipe

This cucumber recipe looks like a great appetizer for the holiday party. Click here to find the recipe.

Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Cod with Mussels, Chorizo, Fried Croutons, and Saffron Mayonnaise

This cod recipe is featured on the Bon Appetit Magazine Oct 2009 issue, how do you like it?

Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Cappuccino Truffles Recipe

This truffles recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Mexican Beef Vegetable Soup

We love this soup so much cause we're able to quickly make it really fresh anytime we feel hungry and we want something wholesome, nutritious and tasty. (no advanced prepping, no heating up of leftover from freezer, we don't really like frozen food if we have a choice...) Click here to read the recipe.

Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

About Us

Before we introduce ourselves, we want you to know that we have a foodie giveaway, click here for detail.

We are a bunch of hungry friends who went broke just eating out and obsessively buying cookbooks. All of us together own over 4000 cook books that are published in Japanese, Chinese, or English that cover cooking from literatelly every cultural perspective. One day, we decided that we would save some money; by may be trying out some of the recipes from our cookbooks instead of drooling over them and go break our wallets for dinners at fancy restaurants every night. We have very little experience in cooking, we never enjoyed the tidious cooking process cause we grew up never had to enter the kitchen for anything. Our cookbook buying addiction had gotten so serious that our cookbooks are literally burying us. Since we can't find a re-hab facility to cure our addiction, we started this blog. We hope to channel our obsession on cookbooks to reading recipe online and learning to actually cook instead.

Each recipe we feature here represents the itch that was driving us to the bookstore, but that was relieved by a wonderful recipe we found on the internet. Some of the recipes here, we have cooked them and tried them and loved them. You can find them here... Other recipes are just pure little patches that we used to soothe our cook book buying itch when it started kicking in. Not all recipes on all blogs and websites can effectively curb our urge to go to the bookstore. Since we grew up with good food at great restaurants, we are only interested in recipes that can provide that great tastes we experienced. In our opinion, life is too short to even attempt in cooking anything that doesn't tastes good. You can save money all you want by cooking crappy food, but you can't buy back every moment in you life you spent eating crappy food. So, we are selective and we only choose great recipes to post here. If you think your blog has a great tasting recipe like that and want to impress our picky palletes, please email us.

Note: Unlike many blogs out there which copy recipe in its entirety from another website or blog, and only put a link that says, "adapted from", we think this is not proper cause no reader will click on that link back to the original site or blog when they can see the whole recipe right there already. Therefore, we don't post the recipe, unless it's orginated from us or our sister blog that is owned by us, we only post our opinion on the recipe and send visitors to the orginator's site or blog if they really want to read about the actual recipe. We think this is the only right thing to do. We believe that copying and pasting the whole recipe from another site is just wrong (even though a fine print link was put to link back to the original blog or site).

Gingerbread Cupcakes

These pretty cupcakes are such festive treats for Christmas. How would you like them as handmade Christmas gifts? Click here to find recipes.

Apple Cider Punch

I made this last night at a Thanksgiving dinner party that I attended. It was a potluck and every guest had to contribute to the Thanksgiving menu. I offered to prepare this beverage because it was easy and I didn't have to do any cooking at home and worry about carrying it and driving it to the party.. I just brought a couple bottles of sparkling wine and used the orange juice, apple cider and lemon juice that were already in the host's fridge and I made the punch at the party right after everybody had arrived. It was such an easy and exotic cocktail recipe that I had pulled off very successful even it was my first trial. It's a fool-proof beverage to make for a big crowd in a couple minutes. It was a big hit and there was no one drop of the punch left in the punch bowl after dinner. I doubled up the recipe and I used organe juice. Next time, I would like to try making it with the cranberry-juice that the recipe also suggested. Click here to see the recipe.

Homemade Bratwurst Bites with Beer and Horseradish Mustard

This Bratwurst recipe is featured on the Bon Appetit Magazine Oct 2009 issue, how do you like it?

Mocha Nut Torte Recipe

This torte recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Brisket Braised in Porter

This brisket recipe is featured on the Bon Appetit Magazine Oct 2009 issue, how do you like it?

Caramel-Crunch Pumpkin Pie Recipe

This pumpkin pie recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Citrus-Avocado Salad

This recipe is featured in the book "Test Kitchen Favorites: 75 Years of Recipes Too Good To Be Forgotten" . You can also find the recipe here.

This recipe was first published by Better Homes & Garden in 1939. One of the ingredients in this recipe is pomegranate seeds. We don't know how widely available were avocados and pomegranate seeds back in 1939 in America since none of us are native of this country, but even with such ingredients easily found in our grocery stores today, we still find this salad refreshing and exotic in today's food-rich culture. The combination of avocado and pomegranate seeds in a salad? We haven't had such an exotic salad even in restaurants in Santa Monica or anywhwere in our metropoltian hometowns in Asia....and we live and breathe in the restaurants all over the world... We've got to try to make this one at home for sure. We love this book cause it shows us a lot of America's history. Amazing what one can learn from a cookbook, no wonder we can't stop buying them... We can only imagine how innovative and forward thinking the American cooks were in 1939. That was before even Julia Child's stint in France. We can't help but wonder why couldn't she look back at her home turf for cooking inspiration. From what I heard from her, it was France that introduced the world of good food to her. May be she would have started cooking earlier if only she had subsribed to the Better Homes & Garden magazines. And just how many Americans in 1939 were oblivious to this forward-thinking recipe, like Julia Child was?

Shrimp Skewers

This shrimp recipe looks like a great appetizer for the holiday party. Click here to find the recipe.

Gingered Orange Beets Recipe

This beets recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Spicy Cranberry Jam

This cranberry recipe is featured on the Martha Stewart Living Magazine November 1997 issue, how do you like it?

German-Style Fried Potatoes

This potato recipe is featured on the Bon Appetit Magazine Oct 2009 issue, how do you like it?

Smoked Thanksgiving Turkey

As my quest for a great tasting and enticing looking turkey continues, I found this turkey recipe on a very interesting food blog that I would like to share with you.... You can go to Chaos In The Kitchen for the recipe. Out of that delicously chaotic kitchen of the blog's author, you can even pick up some great side dishes to pair with this mouth-watering bird.

Roasted Free-Range Turkey with Pear Chestnut Stuffing

Is cooking a turkey really a huge task? I have been reading cooking blogs hoping to find a good turkey recipe that presents an enticing bird prepared by the common folks... (not a chef, not a celebrity cook or a cooking magazine that have 100 years of experience in roasting a pretty turkey...) But I can't seem to have much luck. Lots of blogs don't even blog about a roast whole turkey. Very few do but their birds don't look too good. So I have to once again refer to my favorite guru, Martha Stewart, for a turkey recipe... I just hope with my limited cooking ability, I can manage to reproduce this turkey in my kitchen, without disfiguring its pretty physical appeal...
This turkey recipe is featured on the Martha Stewart Living Magazine November 1997 issue, how do you like it?

Roasted Chicken Drumsticks & Vegetables In Plum Sauce Under $5

I made this tonight for dinner. The preparation is extremely simple and fast. Love this dinner a lot better than the usual take-out I get. Making a good home cooked dinner is not as much trouble as I thought. I can't get any take-out dinner for 4 anywhere cheaper than this, I bought the drumsticks for $2.20, vegetables for $0.88 from Ralph's manager sale tonight. The steam rice I served this with was from the Chinese restaurant leftover my client treated me to 3 days ago. The seasonings are already in my pantry and have been there for a while, glad that I found this recipe to use up the plum sauce that my mother gave me when she won a whole box of 2 dozen from some charity lucky draw she attended... You can find the recipe here.

Pumpkin Soup With Red Pepper Mousse

This is a great soup to slowly begin the Thanksgiving feast. Get the recipe from Gourmet.com.

Brandied Chocolate

This hot chocolate has so much holiday spirit that it's the "beverage" for the holidays. You can find the recipe on Gourmet.com

Quick Sticks

This recipe was originally featured in Martha Stewart Living Magazine November 1997 issue in the article "Making Crackers", sort of to give readers an idea of making cracker gifts for the holidays. When brainstorming for money saving ideas, I suddenly remember this article I read when I was in college... glad to find the recipe updated on Martha Stewart's Website with how-to video.

Braised Pork Chops with Cabbage and Carrot-Parsnip Puree

This pork chop recipe is featured on the Martha Stewart Living Magazine November 1997 issue, how do you like it?

Braised Beef Short ribs with Red Wine Gravy and Swiss Chard

This short rib recipe is featured on the Bon Appetit Magazine Oct 2009 issue, how do you like it?

Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate

Sour Cream Cutouts Cookies

This cookie recipe is featured on the Taste of Home Magazine Dec 2007 issue, how do you like it?

M&M's Pumpkin Cake

This is one cute cake we got to bake for this Halloween!!!

Also, we have some free gifts for all of you foodies out there.. Please click here to participate.

Fig Cake

This recipe is featured on the Oprah Magazine December 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Lane Cake

This recipe is featured on the Oprah Magazine December 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Basler Läckerli

This recipe is featured on the Oprah Magazine December 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Cream Cheese-Chocolate Chip Cookies

This recipe is featured on the Oprah Magazine December 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Roasted Prime Rib

This recipe is featured on the Oprah Magazine December 2007 issue, how do you like it?

Rockerfeller Style Crab

This recipe is from the cookbook Homemade in No Time. It's very easy to prepare and only takes 15 minutes to prep. It tastes great and is such a balanced dish full of proteins and fibres. But the problem of using canned crabmeat is that there are always the softbones here and there mingled with the meat. We love this dish despite the occasional soft crab bone we chewed on... This recipe is also featured on the Better Homes and Garden website. By the way, does anyone know why this is called the Rockerfeller Style Crab? If you do, please let us know!

Smoked Turkey-Sweet Potato Tamales

This recipe is featured on the Oprah Magazine December 2007 issue, how do you like it?