Saturday, January 30, 2010

Chicken Chow Mein


This chicken chow mein recipe is featured in the 3 Books in 1: Chinese, Thai, Japanese Cookbook, how do you like it? Click on the picture to get the recipe.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Simple Fried Rice Recipe

Without even looking at our grocery receipt and sitting down to divide every item we bought by tablespoons and then to muliply by the number of tablespoons we used in this recipe, we are pretty sure that we made this rice dish for four people for much less than $5.00.

We love this recipe because we love fried rice. When we were growing up, our mothers always made fried rice using leftover from the fridge: leftover steamed rice, leftover ham, vegetables, shrimps, bbq pork, etc. Fried rice is just a Chinese way to use up leftover scraps. The best fried rice is actually made with cold rice from the fridge. Freshly steamed rice will make the fried rice too mushy. The fried rice will get stucked to the wok and is difficut to flip and stir if freshly steamed rice is used. Fried rice was never meant to be a dish made out of freshly cooked rice, it's always meant to be a dish to use up leftovers from previous meals.

So after buying a package of bacon and a bunch of green onions for the salad we made the other night, we decided to use up the bacon by making Chinese fried rice out of it. We never really liked bacon, cause we found it too salty, hard and crispy when eaten alone. Bacon is just not our cup of tea. Just we needed the dripping and the bacon bits to try out this salad recipe..... we were stucked with a whole package of it.

Surprisingly, the bacon worked very well with the fried rice and we really enjoyed the way it seasoned the fried rice and the texture it added. Mixed with the fried rice and green onion, the greasiness and fatty texture of the bacons (we didn't cook it to a hard chip) became not noticeable. Instead, we felt like we were having some really tasty meat or ham with fried rice. A bowl of fried rice just brought back childhood memories of how our mothers used to feed us a bowl of fried rice and an apple or an orange for our lunch. Fried rice is often eaten as a side dish here in America, but it was always the one dish meal for our families... This explains why we are skinny even when we don't care for eating low-fat health food...Click here to see this cheap and easy fried rice recipe.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

No Bake Maple Praline Cheesecake

We love cheesecakes but we are no good at baking. The idea of a no bake cheesecake is what motivated us to make our first dessert last night. This cheesecake tasted very good yet we failed to get the firmness of a regular cheesecake out of it even we put it in the fridge for over 1 hour as we were instructed. We absolutely loved eating this cheesecake, just we wish it could be firmer in texture. We wonder may be 1 1/3 cup of cold milk is too much liquid for the filling? What do you think? We think next time we will make it with 3/4 cup cold milk instead. You can click here to get the recipe.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Pesto Mozzarella Cheese Cups

Our New Year's cocktail party this year was an effortless orchestration because we chose to serve easy finger foods with refreshing "easy to concoct" cocktail drinks. This is one of the appetizers that gave us a lot of applause from our guests. This pairs very well with the apple cider punch, wine or beer. It is one of those impressive looking appetizers that is incredibily easy to make. It's an appetizer which has the perfect ingredients that complement each others so well; that it's very sophiscated tasting, yet deliciously uncomplicated with a very pleasant melt-in-the-mouth crispiness. We totally love it!! Click here for the recipe!!