Citrus Ricotta Cookies

Hello hello again. So my posts have been less frequent than usual... it's been a busy busy April and especially May. But I've been making these citrus/lemon ricotta cookies with a delicious glaze, and everybody has loved them, so I just needed to share. :)

They're based off of Giada De Laurentis' (from the Food Network!) recipe. I'll be honest, I don't usually go to the Food Network recipes for my choice of recipes, but I had found a few food blogs that had made these cookies, and it sounded pretty exciting. I had a package of ricotta cheese for some reason--honestly, I can't remember why, but I decided that I needed to use it up. That, and I'm still working on that constant supply of lemons, haha. Also... it's turning to the spring/summer... who doesn't love the light burst of sunlight in their mouths? :)

These cookies aren't so much crunchy or even soft and chewy... they have a more cake-like texture, which is very interesting. It's still very nommy, though! The batter's pretty easy to work with, and uses up both lemon zest and lemon juice, yay!

Click for more ricotta cookie deliciousness. :D

More breakfast: French Toast!

Hey all,

So it's been a while! But I'm back with more breakfast foods... this time, French Toast. :) More specifically, Nutella-stuffed Brioche French Toast with Sauteed Cinnamon Apples.

I've been wanting to make french toast for a while, so I even specifically made Peter Reinhart's Brioche (from the Bread Baker's Apprentice)... it's a lot nicer than a previous brioche recipe that I've used before. But, like any brioche recipe, the dough is kind of sticky and annoying to work with, and definitely requires refrigeration. There are various versions--the Rich Man's Brioche, the Middle Man's Brioche, and the Poor Man's Brioche. The difference is mainly in the amount of butter used... I think that the Middle Man's Brioche was a good choice--not too high in fat, but still buttery, rich, and delicious.

Little brioche à têtes! :D I made one giant 9"x5" loaf, and then another 4 brioche à têtes. :) The little brioche à tête were delicious to eat on their own... I am such a sucker for carbs. They weren't the prettiest things... I tried using the knotting technique instead of making separate balls to make the shape... but I'm sure they'll be prettier next time. :)

Anyhow, so I decided to make french toast the next morning! :) Okay, so yes, they all say that french toast is best made with stale bread, that was it can soak up the "custard" mixture while still holding its shape. I really really wanted to make french toast and to use my brioche, so what I did was cut thick 1/2" slices and toast them on the lowest setting just to dry them out a little. I think stale bread would've been the best... but you work with what you've got!

Click below for more nutella-stuffed brioche french toast with sauteed cinnamon apples.

Good morning... Meyer Lemon Berry Pancakes!

Why hello there. So I apologize for being so MIA this month--it's been a long month with new friends and so many more dance performances. It's vaguely slowing down, but GREs and other things such as peoples' graduations and backpacking trips are right around the corner, so AAAH! Ridiculousness. So even though there has been a decent amount of baking and cooking, but not much photographing, and even less time around the computer. ...I think it's a good thing for me, though, hehehe.

So after another dance performance a week or two ago, I had two friends stay over since they're not from the area. They were able to stick around in the morning, so I figured... why not pancakes?? I don't really make fancy breakfast foods... boiled eggs, cereal, and oatmeal are just fine in my book. But I know everyone likes the occasional breakfast treat, so after browsing through a billion breakfast recipes... and also realizing that my refrigerator was actually pretty empty except lemons (I have a continuous supply of lemons!) left over from an order for lemon tarts and I actually had some leftover buttermilk from making the tiramisu cake (I NEVER have buttermilk!), so I decided on Meyer Lemon Raspberry Pancakes with Raspberry Maple Compote.

Admit it. It looks delicious. M... now you want pancakes. Click below for more pancakes and recipe! :)

Lemon Poppy Seed Bread

So I still had part of a Costco-sized bag of lemons, and I didn't feel like making lemon tarts, lemon curd, or lemon bars... too many eggs and butter and different parts and meh, I was lazy and had been baking a lot. (I had been baking and coking a lot last week... including a whole wheat multi-grain bread, 2 of these lemon poppy seed loafs, vegetable stew, and hot cross buns!  And then a tiramisu cake!) Unfortunately, most lemon cookies or muffins or whatnot require the lemon zest, but not the lemon juice. So what better than a lemon quick bread that requires soaking it with a lemon syrup? ...And then top it off with a lemon glaze?? Not only does it then use lemon juice, but it is also lemon and buttery and delicious.

Okay, confession. I don't really like poppy seed. Maybe my parents bought one too many Noah's poppy seed bagels (By the way, I love Noah's bagels. Grab me a plain bagel, a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese, and an asiago bagel and I will love you forever. Okay, for a moment, until my waist line disappears, then I will hate you. It's that whole love-hate thing, ya know?). Or maybe I really hate how they get stuck in your teeth. Or maybe the flavor's a little too strong. Either way, I don't like poppy seed. But my roommate likes things with poppy seeds. And so do other people. And I found out a couple weeks ago that the local market sells poppy seeds for not to bad a price. So I grab myself a bunch of poppy seeds, figuring that I'd use it for something. Then I remembered, of course. Lemon + poppy seed. Who hasn't heard of that combination?

It seemed to be very popular.

And the glaze. I love sugar. I wanted to lick my cookie sheet after all the excess lemon glaze dripped off of the bread. ...I might've scraped off a few spoonfulls of that delicious lemon-sugar combination. But enough about me, more about the bread behind the jump!

Hot Cross Buns, one a penny, two a penny

Why hello and happy Good Friday and Happy Easter everybody! (To be fair, I started writing this on Friday...) I'm loving trying to bake something for various holidays and celebrations, because I end up learning about the history of the food and the culture/religion it's tied to.

Hot cross buns!  Hot cross buns! One-a-penny, Two-a-penny, Hot cross buns! So everyone's heard of hot cross buns, but it turns out that most people I know have never actually had them, nor do they know what they are. In fact, most people (including myself) only know the first two lines of the nursery rhyme, haha.

So what are hot cross buns? They're generally associated with Easter, and more specifically, Good Friday, with the cross symbolizing The Crucifixion. However, it seems that the hot cross bun actually predates Christianity! Their origins lie in pagan traditions of ancient cultures, celebrating the vernal equinox (Eostre), with the cross possibly representing the balance between light and darkness of the equinox, the four quarters of the moon, or the symmetry of the seasons. During early missionary efforts, the Christian church adopted the buns and re-interpreted the icing cross. In 1361, a monk named Father Thomas Rockcliffe began a tradition of giving Hot Cross Buns to the poor of St. Albans on Good Friday.

Now wasn't that an exciting history lesson?

Anyhow, simply put, hot cross buns is a sweet, spiced yeast bun with currants (or raisins) and often candied citrus peel, and has a cross of a sweet dough on top (though many people now just use an icing for the cross).

I adapted the recipe from Wild Yeast Blog, and oh my goodness is it delicious. I didn't have dried currants, or candied lemon/orange peel, so I just made it with raisins and added a little bit of lemon simple syrup I made while candying lemon slices (I'll write about it later, but it's negligible for the recipe). I saw dried currants at a local farmer's market, so I might get those some day and make these again! Click below for recipe.

St. Patrick's Day! Irish Cream Cupcakes

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! :) So I'm really sad I missed Pi Day. :( This past weekend was extremely full of baking (which I'll post about later), people, and dance, so I didn't get a chance to make some pie. :( But at least I thought about it? Happy belated Pi Day everyone! But anyway, back to St. Patrick's day.

I wanted to make something exciting and fun for St. Patrick's day that I would not otherwise make. I thought about making some Irish Soda Bread, but trying to research the most authentic Irish Soda Bread was getting tiring, and it's not really somethign you give out to everyone. But everyone loves cupcakes, right?

What is that beautiful thing, you ask? Irish cream cupcakes with Irish cream mint frosting topped with an Irish cream brownie.

Yep, I walked over to BevMo! in the beautiful weather yesterday, and got myself a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream. I will be honest, I'm not exactly a drinker and I don't really even like the smell of whiskey, but hey, other people seem to like it, so why not. Recipe and more photos behind the cut. :)

Overcoming fear: French Macarons

Why hello again. So during my baking streak last week, I also decided to make macarons. I had a ton of egg whites left over from making the meyer lemon tartlets (is it tartlet or tartelette??) and I told myself that this time around, I was going to make macarons. I said this last time making... something or another. Yeah, that never happened, oops.

French macarons are another one of those things that I've been overly paranoid about baking. I'd say irrationally, but I've read about and seen many pictures of failed macarons. Also, there are billions of long-winded explanations of how to make them for a reason--they're a bit tricky to get everything right.

But look! But look! Mine came out with feet and everything!

Isn't it purtiful? They're macarons with strawberry cream cheese sandwiched in between. Not too shabby for a first time, I'd say. The shell wasn't the smoothest, and only one of three batches came out (I think because the other two batches I used baking pans with sides (like a 9x13 pan) instead of a cookie sheet, because I only had one)... and I think the "good" macarons were a little hollow inside, but uh, oh well? I've only had one macaron once in SF, but I'd say mine's not too shabby at all, not at all. Click below for more macaronage. :)

Meyer Lemon Tartlets

So not only was I obsessed with making all sorts of buns last week, but I also had so many lemons sitting on my dining table... I had gotten a giant bag of lemons and a giant box of meyer lemons (yay Costco), and they had been sitting there for, well, forever, and some of the meyer lemons looked like they were on their way out. So, as much as I love the idea of making lemon-y things, it's actually hard to find lots of good recipes that require a lot of lemon juice. Most things require just the lemon zest, or just a tablespoon or two of lemon juice, and I didn't feel like making lemon curd. For some odd reason, I liked being able to bake the lemon-y innards... maybe because it makes it easier to deliver to other people? Who knows.

Anyhow, I finally after going through so many food blogs and so many pages on Google, I came across this recipe for a meyer lemon tart on the New York Times online, and figured that I'd give it a go. It was adapted from Alan Tangren's recipe, who was a co-pastry chef at Chez Panisse (well known high-end restaurant here in the East Bay). Sounds credible, and most importantly, used 5 or so lemons!

The result? Full of deliciousness... tasty shortbread crust that didn't shrink too much, and a delicious lemon-curd-like filling that was baked with the tart. It requires so many eggs and so much butter, but, well, it's worth it.

This is such a yellow dish. Yellow is such a bright and happy color...! All the ingredients and the final product are full of yellow. I don't usually like yellow, but for some reason, yellow food always looks so deliciously happy.

Yes, it uses a ridiculous amount of egg yolks, but also so much lemon!

Sheng Jian Bao (Pan-Fried Pork-Filled Buns)

Hi all! So while looking up various bao (bun) recipes, I found out that the dough for sheng jian bao (and cha shau bao/char siu bao depending on Mandarin vs. Cantonese) used pretty much the same dough, a yeast dough (as opposed to shao long bao, or potstickers, etc.). So, of course, I had to make sure of my new awesome discovery of fluffy white bun dough, and didn't feel like going to the Chinese market for cha shao meat, so I settled for making sheng jian bao! Sheng jian bao translated basically means pan-fried buns. The "fun" part of eating these is supposed to be the crispy bottom that is created from pan-frying the bun, as such.

Crispy bottom aside, these are delicious. :d They require some random ingredients more commonly found in a Chinese pantry, but, as silly as this is, I'm getting happy that my cabinets are more filled with Chinese condiments/ingredients such as Sriracha, rice wine vinegar, and Shaoxing cooking wine. I get a little smile from opening my cabinets.

Anyhow, the dough is fairly easy, and aside from draining the cabbage, it's actually a pretty simple recipe. The only majorly annoying part is (a) making sure you have all the ingredients, and (b) figuring out the best way to quickly pleat the buns so they come out pretty and the first ones aren't overly-risen by the time you finish making the last one. Anyhow, recipe behind the cut. :)

Dou Sha Bao (Red Bean Buns)

So last week I had a hankering for delicious Chinese buns. The dough for steamed buns are so delectably fluffy, especially when steaming hot. I had been searching for a good recipe for Chinese bread doughs in general. There are many variations out there, many calling for low gluten flour, some calling for bread flour, and some just using the bag of "bao mix" that you can buy at the Asian supermarket. Finally, I came across one that seemed to have good results: a nice chewy skin from steaming, and a light, white, fluffy inside.

This dough can actually be used to make all sorts of steamed buns... filled with sweet fillings such as lotus seed paste, red bean paste, black sesame paste, or even rolled into a more savory scallion bun, or stuffed with pork filling to make sheng jian bao (pan-fried buns) or BBQ pork to make tsa sao bao (also known as char shiu bao). It can even be made into plain rolls. Yummy. For the first go-around, I decided to fill it with sweet red bean paste. :) I even went and got myself a bamboo steamer! :D It was awesomely exciting. Click for the recipe!

Cioppino (seafood stew)... kind of

So I had been craving lots of seafood for the past... well, long time. I love seafood. Especially shrimp. And clams. And crabs. And scallops. And, oh yeah, shrimp. Shrimp is tasty. Okay, yes, I think you get the fact that I love seafood. Anyhow, because I love seafood and because seafood is so much more (relatively) expensive compared to other things (read: chicken salad or giant burrito), I've laid off the seafood thing for a while. I kept on coming up with excuses like it's too expensive, I don't really know how to pick out fresh seafood from a market, I don't trust most frozen seafood, especially shellfish, it's really expensive, I don't know how to handle/cook it properly, I've never really had that dish before so I wouldn't know how to make it... oh yeah, "I'm too tired to cook anything fancy" was a commonly-used one as well ...but then I ran across a cooking blog where the writer said that that Trader Joe's frozen shrimp collection wasn't half bad. So, after weeks of procrastinating and excuse-making, I finally decided last weekend that I was going to make a cioppino-esque dish.

Oh! Random, but I love the colors of bright green fresh parsley against the deep red of fresh tomatoes.

Cioppino is a dish that originated from the Italian fishermen in San Francisco that would make a tomato-based stew with all the left-over seafood from the day's catch usually featuring crabs, clams, squid, mussels, shrimps, scallops, and fish in a tomato-wine sauce. While visiting Monterey Bay about two years ago, we stopped by an amazing seafood restaurant (I must remember which restaurant that is some day...), and as great as my dish was, I couldn't stop looking over to the table next to ours... some guy had this amazing-looking seafood stew with pasta. Apparently it was cioppino. So I've been obsessed with cioppino ever since.

I made a very lazy-person's and poor(ish)-man's cioppino. I used frozen seafood and canned clams. It wasn't bad, but maybe when I make it for company, I can use some fresh seafood. :) It was a very tasty soup. Unfortunately, as I predicted, it was a bit salty due to the ingredients that I had in my cupboard. Anyhow, like many soups and stews, these measurements are all approximate and have a lot of give and take, depending on how heavily tomato-based you want your soup, how hearty you want your stew, and what types of seafood you want in your stew. Click below for a recipe. :)

Chocolate Truffles

So the other half of February 14th is, of course, Valentine's Day. For those of you who don't really know me, I'm kind of weird. So, on Valentine's Day, when the world is full of pink and everyone is covered head to toe with red and pink, I don my all-black attire and studded and spiked bracelets and chokers. I even top it off with (sometimes heavy) black eyeliner (and black lipstick if I'm feeling daring that year).

(Valentine's Day 3 years ago)

Something like that. Oh yeah. Still, this year, since Chinese New Years fell on the same day, I had to wear a little bit of red (you can see the necklace in the first picture in my previous post!) and I opted out on the heavy eye makeup. Anyhow, I'm sure you care about all the random trivia about me and my habits. So, of course, Valentine's Day means chocolate and sharing love. So, I decided to share my love via chocolate truffles... 4 different types of chocolate truffles!

Chocolate truffles aren't that hard to make ingredient and technique-wise... it just takes a little bit of time and messiness. They're so worth it, though. It's the same technique to make a chocolate ganache (or whipped ganache) for frosting a cake. :)

Of course, since it's mostly chocolate, the type of chocolate that you use is very important. If you use a dark, smooth chocolate, you will end up with a very smooth truffle. If you use some mediocre chocolate, you will end up with mediocre truffles. So I splurged a little for the people around me to make some darn good chocolate. Click below for recipe and ideas for truffle flavors!

Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day!

Xing nian kuai le! Gong xi fa cai. (i.e. Have a prosperous new year.) Oh yeah, and Valentine's Day. And President's Day! ...And happy Mardi Gras today. Goodness gracious it's a bunch of things to celebrate about recently!

Of course, that means there has been lots of baking/cooking and handing out of delicious goodies. There have been various dark chocolate truffles, Chinese almond cookies, and red bean nian gao (sticky rice cake)!

So February 14th was not only Valentine's Day, but it was also Chinese/Lunar New Years! It's now the year of the Tiger... it's my year! This meant only one thing: hot pot!

Photograph courtesy of Avi

What is 火鍋 (i.e. hot pot), you ask? Clearly, as you can see from the photograph, it is loads of fun. (And no, I wasn't the only girl there!) Click below to see more of what hot pot is and for Chinese Almond Cookies and Red Bean Nian Gao (stick rice cake)! :)

Meyer Lemon Ginger Muffins

...with cream cheese filling. Doesn't that sound yum?

So not only did I have a bunch of lemons that I took forever to use, I also bought a package of meyer lemons from Trader Joe's thinking that I would be completely inspired and do something awesome with them.

Yeah, that was a complete fail. The lemons have just hung around idly in their little package for the past few weeks and all I've done is stare at them and then go somewhere else. Finally, my friend was leaving for a one-day ski trip (read: leaving way too early in the morning and arriving home way too late) with a group of people, so I figured, why not used that as a motivator to use my meyer lemons for some good. I debated using them just as a stand-in with any other lemon recipes that I have... maybe even the lemon bars that I made last time. At the same time, I've never used meyer lemons before and I was terrified that I was going to make something that just wasn't quite right. For those of you that aren't familiar with meyer lemons, they are a hybrid of true lemons and mandarin oranges, making them a little sweeter with an oranger (sure, that's a real word) than normal lemons.

So, for the most part, I didn't feel too adventurous about messing with recipes calling for normal lemons (probably irrational, but whatever, deal with it). Finally, running through some recipes of meyer lemons and trying to decide what would be easiest for a group of groggy people to eat for breakfast or as a on-the-slopes snack, I decided on making meyer lemon ginger muffins (with a cream cheese filling!). I've been avoiding making muffins and cupcakes for a while because I always hate washing out muffin tins, but I should get over that silliness. (By the way, do muffins count as a quick bread? I think it does, right? Or is it in its own special category?)

I definitely need to bake more with lemons vs. meyer lemons to try and figure out the subtle differences between the two, but until then, click below for more pictures and recipe!

Lemon Bars

Oh my goodness! Blogger just deleted my entire post, and I'm annoyed. Okay, let's try this again.

Hi everyone! For those of you living in the Bay Area, I hope you're enjoying this storm that has hit the West Coast, because I am. The torrential downpour. The lightning. The thunder. I'm loving it. Currently, my patio door is opened, making it ridiculously cold in my apartment, but I can clearly hear the rain falling on the ground with the thunder rolling by and it's totally worth it. It sends shivers up my spine and I can't help but smile.

For those of you that hate this wet, dark, weary and dreary weather, I've decided to post about a little ray of sunshine: lemon bars!

Aren't they so bright and scrumptious looking? It's like a little reminder of summer. Or something like that. Anyhow, a fellow friend gave me a bag of lemons from his backyard and I promised that I would use them for evil good. However, I just kind of stared at them for a week, not sure of what I should do with them and no real inspiration hit. Finally, I settled on lemon bars. Lemon bars are one of those things I avoided for a while because I was irrationally afraid of anything curd-like or custard-like (but the creme brulees proved that I was just being ridiculous!). So, after what was over a week, I started to flip through all my bookmarks of various baking blogs and leafed through my various cookbooks to try and figure out what might seem like a good lemon bar recipe. What if it was too tart? What if it was too sweet? What if what if what if? Ridiculous, right? I also wanted to find something that had a good ratio of lemon goodness to shortbread crust (i.e. lots of lemon-y goodness). Something that would also hold together on its own without looking like it was about to melt off the cooling rack. So, in the end, I adapted from Bakerella's recipe.

Let's see what these little lemons can do!

Vanilla Bean Creme Brulee

Look, look, a post! Here is the promised creme brulee recipe. I love cracking the layer of caramel on top... :)

For Christmas, my roommate gave me a kitchen torch (I know, Edith + fire? Sounds like a disastrous combination, I know. It's okay, you're probably right. But I'm still okay for now!) and his parents gave me some beautiful creme brulee ramekins. So I'm not much up for the multi-tasking baking dishes for the most part, and the deeper ramekins that most people use are nice, but these are just beautiful.

And, honestly, my favorite part of the creme brulee is usually the burnt sugar on top, so these shallow ramekins give just the perfect portion of burnt sugar to custard. It was seriously nommy.

Creme brulee (with its respective accents that I don't know how to do in Blogger) means "burnt cream" in French. It is a dish that is comprised of a rich custard bottom layer and a top layer of caramel. There are so many various recipes out there, each with their own ratio of egg yolks to various types of cream/milk to amount of sugar. Having never really made custard (I tend to avoid it... my fear of tempering anything makes me avoid certain recipes... but I'm working on that!), I wasn't sure which recipe sounded the best. Also, many of the recipes came with fancy flavors like lavender or ginger or chocolate, and I just wanted a simple vanilla creme brulee. However, I knew that I didn't want something too sweet and tasting too much like egg yolks. So, after reading about 15 different creme brulee recipes, I decided to combine a few of them and make my own vanilla bean creme brulee recipe. (Don't ask me which recipes I combined... there was like, a combination of 3... so it's kind of my own recipe, right?)

It was delicious. I generally don't actually really like creamy things, especially custard, but I loved the flavor in this, and I think the people that ate it liked it too. :) Click below for more pictures and recipe!

Photography, pound cake, and so much catching up

So for any of you living in California, or more specifically, the Bay Area... seriously, what's with the weather? Pouring rains, ridiculous humidity and mid-70s the next day, and "afternoon showers" that flood streets and burst pipes in the 5 hours it rains. Seriously? However, it has led to some great opportunities for photography and playing around with my camera.



The nights in the past few weeks have been amazingly clear, and the previous photograph and the next ones are a result from playing around with my shutter speed.

Look at how amazingly still that water is! This is the bay... all summer it was ridiculously windy, and it was definitely a lot colder at night back in July and August. Again, I'm not the biggest fan of scenic/still photography, but it's still fun to capture the weather and light is always fun to play around with... like when the sky opens up on the Bay with San Francisco in the background.



The sunset on Monday night after the afternoon "showers" was gorgeous. I was waiting at the bus stop on the way to an Owl City concert in the city, and the sunset was just so gorgeous that I couldn't resist.





But enough pictures of the bay (I promise there won't be too many anymore... I mean, you can only have so many pictures of the same place before you get sick of seeing yet another pretty sunset or "Jesus beams."). I have a backlog of photos of the food that I baked 2 weeks ago, and I totally forgot about the cranberry cream cheese pound cake that I baked for the tea party!



So, for some carrot cake, celebration challah, and cranberry cream cheese pound cake, click below! I apologize for the half-photographed steps, but I was in a constant rush making all of these. (Recipe for pound cake below as well!)

Moon cakes (and Blogger finally has jump breaks!)

So a couple of nights ago (Saturday, October 3rd, to be exact), was the Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhong Qiu Jie). It's an excuse to eat delicious moon cakes! Just kidding. (But it's definitely a bonus!) The Mid-Autumn Festival is on the 15th day of the eighth month of the Chinese calendar, which generally falls on a day late September/early October, when the moon is all it fullest and roundest.

Hopefully some of you had a chance to enjoy the full moon... I did! I walked down the pier near my apartment, and had fun playing with my camera and my lenses in the sunset and watching the full moon rise.


Photograph courtesy of Mike Ross.



The Mid-Autumn Festival is usually celebrated by eating pomelo, observing the beautiful moon, eating mooncakes, lighting lanterns, and, of course, vibrant celebration! I kind of did two of the above? I saw the full moon rise, made mooncakes, and performed with my Chinese dance group (for Homecoming at Cal, but it still counts, kind of?).


Photography courtesy of Mike Ross.

As with every Chinese celebration, this one comes with its on myth/folk tale. Of course, there are many various versions of the story of the moon, but the one I'm most familiar with is the one that I used to read as a child--the public library near where I grew up had this fantastic selection of Chinese-English children's books which recounted lively stories of the Monkey King, or told how things like the moon or the parrot-shaped rock came to be in Taiwan, or why we celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival or the Dragon Boat Festival, or even told us tales warning us of our own laziness and selfishness.



Oh! Oh! So. Blogger finally added an entry cut jump breaks! Huzzah! So, finally, I'll stop hogging all your internets when you're trying to load up this silly page. So, for more about the Moon Festival and beautiful pictures of said mooncakes, click below!

Peanut Soba Noodles

Here's a little bit of non-baked vegetarian food! I was to have lunch with a grad student who had worked on the safe water and hygiene project in the slums of Mumbai--in fact, she became the head project manager. She's been locked up in her little office on campus, and has vowed to have lunch outside every day. So we met up for lunch... she's been traveling non-stop for the previous 7-8 months in India and Asia for her research, so I haven't really talked to her for a while. She's vegetarian, so I decided to make a soba noodle salad/pasta with a slightly spicy peanut sauce.

Here are some of the ingredients!

Cheesy Crusty Loaf and failure.

So perhaps an explanation of my little cheesy bread monster is called for...

So my volcano of bread and cheese (i.e. the CHEESE SQUID MONSTER!) was an attempt of making the King Arthur's Hot Cheese Bread. Unfortunately, aside from amazingly tasty cheese, the bread dough itself didn't turn out well. It looked like it wasn't completely cooked thoroughly, but I don't think that was the problem... maybe I added too much gluten protein? I had substituted some AP Flour for the bread flour (since bread flour is more expensive!), and it usually works out well, but maybe I put too much? Or kneaded it too much? Not sure. Anyhow, click below for a step-by-step.