Latest Creations

I know I haven’t posted in far too long–but in my defense, it was because I moved from Southern California to Oregon! In any case, here are my latest dishes, some sweet, some savory, in order from newest to oldest:

Banana Spice Pancakes with Tropical Fruit and Agave Nectar Compote

Dark Chocolate Salted Caramel Bacon Brownies

Four Cheese Tortellini, sauteed Snow Peas, onions, and Spinach, over a bed of Butternut Squash Cubes, Grape Tomatoes, and Diced Strawberries that have been roasted in a spicy and sweet Balsamic Glaze.

Triple Layer White Chocolate Key Lime Custard Mousse Pie

Beef Stew with Caramelized Onions, Balsamic Vinegar, Snow Peas, Shiitake Mushrooms reconstituted in Au Jus, simmered in Rosemary Gravy

Fancy Tuna Salad

What you need:

15 ounces of tuna – can be any kind you like, except for the stuff that has been canned in oil.
6 hard boiled eggs, diced
1 cup sweet corn nibblets
1.5 cups of diced celery
1/4 cup of dill relish
1/4 cup of diced strawberries (or raspberries, or mandarins, or pineapples–just use a fruit that is tart and acidic)
3 tablespoons of fresh cilantro, finely chopped
1 tablespoons of minced garlic
1 tablespoon of paprika
1 tablespoon of chili powder
1/2 tablespoon of dill
1/2 tablespoon of basil
1/2 tablespoon of oregano
3 teaspoons of pomegranate vinegar
3 tablespoons spicy brown mustard
1 cup light mayo
1/4 cup plain, organic yogurt. Greek yogurt is recommended, too.
salt and pepper to taste

Mix everything in a gigantic bowl or tupperware. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours.

Everything diced should be about the size of the corn nibblets, for even mixing/distribution in every serving. And the measurements on all the seasonings can be adjusted to taste. I personally have been known to triple the amount of chili powder, paprika, dill, and black pepper, as I think the extra heat adds great depth to the salad.

This is excellent, served over something like a bed of spicy, baby arugula, and drizzled with a raspberry vinaigrette. It makes fantastic tuna melts, when you use a really good melting cheese like Asiago or Fontina, on sourdough toast or grilled Ciabatta rolls, with a smear of garlic butter. It even makes a great dip for tortilla chips. Or spoon a bit into the middle of a basil or spinach leaf, wrap it, and skewer it to a crostini or oversized, homemade croutons, and drizzle with olive oil for an appetizer. My favorite, though is just to pile a ton of it on fresh, whole grain, Bavarian wheat bread, and nothing else. Great source of protein, too.

ENJOY! (That’s a direct order. So do it or I’ll harm you.)

Fin!

Dark Chocolate Orange Poundcake, frosted, drizzled with chocolate sauce, and surrounded with mandarin slices. SO TASTY! And perfectly refreshing for a summertime dessert.

Birthday Baking

There are two Cancer birthdays this weekend: my sister, Aimmee, and my friend Cambria, aka Pants.

Dark Chocolate Orange Pound Cakes for Aimmee, cooling. They will be frosted with chocolate orange whipped cream, and topped with mandarin slices.

Red Velvet Caramel Brownies, cooling. They will be topped with red velvet crème anglaise.

It tastes EPIC, but was an utter pain to cook/whisk, forever, over the double-boiler, with my broken finger.

Ouch.

More Baking!

I made cream cheese cinnamon rolls. Sans frosting or icing. They don’t need it.

The Truth…

…of why I’ll likely never be a really skinny girl…

While some would speculate it is because I’m a pastry chef. And while I theoretically could eat rich, sugary, diabetes inducing desserts every day, I most certainly do not. I don’t even like having things like jelly or jam, ever, because I find them to be too sweet. Not that I don’t have a sweet tooth–I totally do–but it’s rather picky.

But really, my ultimate undoing is that I LOVE PASTA. ESPECIALLY WITH CREAM/CHEESE SAUCES.

If I could only ever eat one cuisine for the rest of my life, I would surely pick Italian, because I’m stupid-addicted to pasta and cheese.

With that said, for lunch today, I made pasta shells with a Romano, Asiago, and herb sauce, and steamed broccoli.

Yes, I’ll be doing HIIT swimming for about an hour, followed by a non-stop, 15 minute, hands-free-water-tread, later this evening. But there’s still no way I’m burning enough fuel to pay for this pasta debt. *sigh*

DAMN YOU, PASTA! Why do you make me love you?!!?!?!

For the record, I’ve tried whole-wheat pasta. I’ve tried vegetable pasta. I’ve tried egg noodles…and while I am a skilled enough chef to make all of those extremely tasty, it is just not the same. The difference to my palette, is as distinct as the one between a burger made of kobe beef, and a “garden burger”. There is no substituting the real thing.

5am Sandwich

7 Grain Whole Wheat, with turkey, provolone, and an egg fried into the top slice. A great way to get a lot of flavor, plus lean protein, whole grains, and complex carbs!

Instructions:

Heat up a cast iron skillet to medium. Don’t grease it with anything.

Take your preferred choice of bread. Butter (or margarine) the outside slices. Cut a hole about the size of an egg, out of the middle of the top slice.

Buttered side down, take the bottom slice and layer whatever fillings you want. I used deli turkey slices and provolone cheese. (I would’ve also used avocado as well, but as I said in an above comment, I didn’t have any.) Set the bottom half of the sandwich, as well as the “hole” you cut out of the top slice, aside.

Put the top slice, buttered side down, into the pan, then crack an egg into the hole. After about 1 minute on medium heat, I turn the heat to low, and put the lid of the pan on top to “cloud” the sunny egg. The steam will help cook it through, better, as you won’t be flipping the slice over to cook the other side, like you would with a One-Eyed-Jack.

Leave it on low heat with the lid on for 2 minutes. Then remove the lid, and place the top half of the sandwich on top of the slice/egg in the pan. Again, put the lid on, and let it sit for another 2 minutes on low.

Then, crank the heat to med-high, take off the lid, and flip the entire sandwich to grill the bottom slice. If you have to, use an extra wide spatula and tongs so you don’t break the egg yolk in the process. Let the bottom slice grill until you see the cheese is completely melted through and gooey, or to whatever consistency you like your grilled cheese to be. Remove sandwich, then grill the “hole” in the same pan. Some people throw the “hole” out, but I find it useful in soaking up any spare egg yolk on the plate, once the sandwich has been consumed. Waste not, you know?

The Joys of Cooking

The trouble with being a chef is, no matter how hard you try, unless someone ELSE is doing (or already has done–as in reheating something) the cooking, there is no such thing as a quick, Midnight Snack. You think there is, but you’re wrong.

Although technically, this was not a true Midnight Snack. It isn’t as if I’d gone to bed and woke up with a craving. I’m on a wacky, nocturnal timeline, so this was actually my lunch. Whatever.

I thought I would just throw something together. But as I rummage through the pantry, the refrigerator, etc. I find more and more that sounds amazing.

I ended up making vegetable and tofu curry.

Ingredients:

* 1 Tofu brick, diced into 1/2 inch cubes
* 1 red bell pepper, diced
* 1 yellow bell pepper, diced
* 1 orange bell pepper, diced
* 1/2 cup broccoli florets, chopped into bite-sized bits
* 1/2 carrots, julienned
* 1/4 cup sweet corn niblets
* 1/3 cup snow peas
* 1/4 cup peas
* 3 cups steamed rice
* 1 can coconut milk
* 2 tablespoons green curry paste
* 2 tablespoons red curry paste
* 2 teaspoons smoked paprika
* 1 teaspoon chili powder

All the veggies were sauteed in a bit of olive oil but NOT cooked through. You want the veggies to remain mostly raw so they remain crispy, since this isn’t a recipe where you’d be able to remove them into an ice bath to stop the cooking process.

Then in went the can of coconut milk and curry paste. All of that is simmered and reduced about 1/2, on low heat, or until the sauce reaches the desired consistency. If you find you didn’t drain your tofu well enough, and the sauce is going to be too runny, or you’ll overcook the veggies before the sauce thickens enough, dissolve 1 teaspoon of cornstarch in 1/2 teaspoon of water, then whisk it into the pan, making sure there are no lumps. Some would suggest adding flour to thicken the sauce, but they usually do it wrong and it results in lumps of raw flour. Gross.

Last, seasoning is added, stir everything, and then serve over a bed of steamed rice. Assuming you don’t overcook the veggies, everything should remain properly crispy/crunchy, except the rice. If you made crunchy rice then you have serious problems and I’d ban you from my kitchen.

The above quantity serves 8-10. That is, unless you eat ridiculous portion sizes. Which you very well may do. In that case, I would say 4-5 people. This was the smallest I was able to scale the recipe, as it is IMPOSSIBLE to make something like this, for one person.

No, I didn’t take a picture, because I’m lazy. There’s enough leftovers that I may take one, tomorrow.

Edit: Nevermind. Here it is.

Still Wet. Still Red. Still Chocolate.

This post is dedicated to people who love chocolate, but don’t like Red Velvet, because they don’t realize that Red Velvet IS CHOCOLATE.

I had the itch to bake, but nothing complicated. Mostly because I knew my spine was going to start to protest long before I could do something all that time-consuming.

I made a super moist, light, red velvet cake. I didn’t want to fill or frost it with cream cheese frosting, though, because that would be far too sweet for what I’m in the mood. Instead, I decided to drown the cake in rich, dark chocolate ganache.

Extremely bittersweet and dark chocolatey, which is what I wanted. Yay!

One cake is for my family to share, the other is for a party this Sunday, honoring approximately 30-50 Filipino performers/singers.

I didn’t have any tupperware or cake boxes tall enough to store them in without smooshing/denting the ganache, so I MacGuyvered a box out of rectangular cakeboards and plastic wrap. Go, me! Now they shall keep just fine until the party on Sunday. I will try to remember to take pictures of the final presentation, before it’s all in people’s tummies. =)

The two cake tops, crumbled up and drowned in the leftover ganache. No, I didn’t eat the whole thing. 99% of it is still in a bowl, downstairs, for the family to pick off of.

Extreme close up of the cake and ganache cooling! Mmmm…now I have to swim about 40 laps to burn off the 3 bites I had. =/

Frilipino.

The all new Breakfast Hybrid of French and Filipino:

(Please excuse the terrible photo quality–my digital camera’s battery was dead and I was forced to use my mobile to take these pictures.)

So what the heck is it? Perfect, really.

It started with a craving for Blueberry waffles, which I couldn’t make because, despite being a chef I do not own a waffle iron. Sad, isn’t it? In any case, I usually sate my waffle cravings with crépes, but I wasn’t in the mood for crépes…just the fillings and toppings that I normally make with crépes, (or waffles).

My Mum had just made a batch of the Filipino dessert known as Put0. Only, my Mum doesn’t make it with rice like Filipinos do, because she’s crazy like that. She makes it using Crépe batter. She employs the same steaming technique as the traditional Puto, but considers rice flour too time-consuming to work with. Crépe batter gives the cake a much finer, creamier texture. Even the best Puto, made with rice, can be a bit chunky, grainy, or a gelatin-like in consistency, even in the same batch! You basically never know what you’ll get with rice flour, except for the flavor, which is consistent. Sweet, creamy, buttery rice, and you can never go wrong with that.

Every the adventurer, I decided to see if I could marry Mum’s Puto and my affinity for sweet cream cheese pastry filling and fruit compotes into something irresistable. I’m pretty sure I hit the mark.

The compote is made from blueberries, simmered in blueberry pomegranate juice and sweetened with boysenberry preserves. The filling is made from cream cheese, unsalted sweet cream butter, and a few tablespoons of the compote. I took a finished cake, sliced it into three layers, filled the layers with the cream cheese, then poured the warm compote over the top. No sugar was used in the filling or compote, as the cake is rather rich and sweet, so a little bit of fruity and creamy tart seemed the perfect compliment.