Green Beans in Writing

This is one of my favorite ways of preparing Chinese vegetables — the same techniques work well for any Chinese green leafy vegetables. I’m not sure how this technique would work on other types of leafy vegetables — I’m sure it’ll be just fine!

Cut the long vegetables in half for easier manageability. Boil water in a wok. Let vegetables sit in water for a minute or so — then drain the veggies and place on a plate. Drizzle the oyster sauce and sesame oil on the veggies. The dish is done!

I guess part of it is just flying home once a year, but the food scene in Hawaii seems to be changing very rapidly! There is now a new cake shop that opened up at Ward Center in Hawaii which features Japanese style pastries. I don’t normally like cake — but when I do like cake, it tends to be light and fluffy and just a little sweet — which is pretty much how Asian cakes are. I absolutely had to make a visit to this cake shop!

This particular cake featured chestnuts. As a kid, I grew up craving the taste of chestnuts - which was so expensive that it was a treat I probably had only two times in my lifetime. The taste of this chestnut cake was a nice surprise to me in terms of taste. I loved this cake a lot although other people didn’t find it that distinguishable. They also had other unusual treats including a green tea cannoli which I thought was pretty interesting. I also had their yogurt drink which was not really much of a drink at all because it was so thick! But I love their yogurt. It was tart and just a little sweet. Quite expensive though at $4. All in all, it was a nice place to try something new!

Completely vegetarian and really tasty! Now if I can only cook like this at home all the time…

This lovely restaurant is called Greens and it is located in San Francisco. The menu there is completely vegetarian - but if you’re an adventurous type who doesn’t always need meat at every meal - you’ll enjoy this restaurant a lot. I have always complained about the fact, that with 98% of takeout food, you will never have enough vegetables to fulfill a daily fiber requirement! I usually need to order a separate vegetarian dish in order to get enough vegetables in one meal.

With this restaurant, everything is a vegetable (or fruit!). As a result, I tried a lot of vegetables I have never tried before, including beets, endives, squash and some other vegetables I don’t quite recognize. Quite neat!!

The appetizer included roasted vegetables with a type of soft cheese. oo ordered an enchilada dish, and I got the greek phyllo dish. It was all very good — one of the most satisfactory and creative meals I have had in awhile!

http://www.greensrestaurant.com/

i’m getting lazy these days about writing about my cooking. i need a one button function that will edit my pictures, upload it and write about my pictures for me! this is for a certain friend back home who recently asked me what i have been making lately.

recently i whipped up some udon noodles based on a memory of my mom’s udon noodles. i don’t think my noodles are similar to hers at all but they are quite tasty! the secret, i think are onions. when you cook the onions long enough so that it becomes soft, it becomes very sweet to the taste, and adds a nice nuanced dimension to the noodles. meat is optional, i threw in the chicken because i needed to use it up anyway. i seasoned with salt and freshly ground black pepper (something i discovered recently!) . i then threw in sliced napa cabbage (won bok) and carrots — stirfried it all until it’s tender - but not wilted! finally, i added in the udon noodles. the udon noodles came in a pack - it came pre-cooked, so all i needed to do was throw it in the wok and just warm it up. you can break up the noodles in the pan too. if your noodles are sticking to the pan or needs a little help warming up– a little chicken broth won’t hurt.

i also seasoned the udon dish with oyster sauce. you can also try adding hoisin sauce too. and that’s it!

I am not really much of a baker. I have never seen my mom bake cookies in my lifetime, and the nearest thing she made that comes close to dessert are chinese sponge cake and chinese style mochi. So baking seems very foreign to me — there’s a whole bunch of recipes that require butter for one thing, which is something i’m not used to keeping in the fridge, and then there are all these tools required just for the craft of baking– I don’t own a sifter, a lemon zester, a cake pan, an ice cream scoop or a whisk. Baking also seems to require too many steps. With stirfry, all you have to do is chop up the veggies, chuck it in the wok, and stir fry with a few sauces. Baking seems too high maintenance by comparison. It also requires too many ingredients that I don’t normally have — chocolate chip, butter, confectioner’s sugar, etc.

Well one day, we were shopping at walmart and bought a package of pepperidge farm chocolate chip cookies because they reminded me of my college days when I would convert my unused meal points for free snacks up to $4.50. I started eating these cookies while drinking tea and I realized how well tea and cookies complement each other really well. Tea helps to make the cookies taste less sweet, and also cleans your palate between each bite of the cookie, so that you can enjoy each bite as if it is still your first bite of the cookie. When there were no cookies left, I decided I should make my own!

One of the reasons why I don’t usually bake is because I’m kind of a health nut. I figured the reason why I’m so healthy these days is because I don’t usually cook with butter or eat sweets. But a friend sent me this recipe using no butter and eggs — and the results are just delicious. It obviously won’t beat a cookie with real butter and eggs — but if you didn’t have the two cookies to compare side by side, you wouldn’t have noticed the difference!

I imagine I’ll eventually try other forms of baking with real butter. (My fiance has a sweet tooth that he’s trying to satisfy with supermarket goods which I think is worse than baking stuff yourself!!). But I do pat myself on the back for baking only my third batch of cookies in my life. The first batch came out really droopy (someone used egg substitute), my second batch came out ok but just a little too crisp and I gave most of it away for xmas. I think this third batch is my best batch ever. Perhaps I will surprise myself someday and bake a pie.

so since i had lots of free time and energy on my hand these days, i decided to make won tons. earlier on sunday, i picked up a pound of ground chicken and a pound of shrimp at ranch 99, three bunches of chives, napa cabbage and a bunch of green onions. traditionally, wontons are made with ground pork and shrimp. i am pretty certain that i am the first person in my family to make wontons with ground chicken. but i figured, chicken is pretty bland in general, and chives go well with shrimp so chicken would work fine too!

i mixed the ground chicken and shrimp together, added in chopped up chives and chinese cabbage (napa) and ended up with a big bowl of this.

and there in my kitchen on sunday night, was a pivotal moment for me. i never was able to get a straight answer from my parents in terms of how to season the meat. but when i looked at my two pounds of meat sitting in the bowl, i realized that this was because they season the meat according to taste and circumstances!! this is tough to do as a novice cook, but i figured that as long as the meat is fresh, and i didn’t put too much salt, it should be fine.

from my google research of various wonton recipes, i knew i could use salt, shoyu, oyster sauce, white pepper, rice wine. i started seasoning the meat with a light hand, and started the pot of water boiling so i could sample the first batch of wontons i seasoned. (thanks for the tip kirk!) my wonton buddy sampled the first wonton and thought it could use more seasoning, so he dumped a batch of oyster sauce into the filling.

the next part of making wontons was a fun and extremely fulfilling hypnotizing therapy for me.

1. start off by putting a teaspoon of filling in the center of the wrapper

2. wet one finger in a bowl of water, place your finger on one corner of the wrapper, and then wet the edges of the first side and the edges of the second contingent side. the idea is to have two wet ends so you can fold the wet ends over the dry ends it and the wrapper will stick together in a neat triangle.

3. hold the triangle upside down and wet one end of the wrapper. bring the edges closer together.

4. press the two ends together. the ends should stick together for good because you wetted one corner of the tip.

5. if this wonton doesn’t look recognizeable yet, then see the next picture.

and look what we had for dinner!!

as for the wrappers, you can pick up ready made wrappers at ranch 99 for $1. i bought two sets of wonton wrappers and really liked the quon yick brand because the wrapper was much finer, and melted in my mouth. other ingredients i’ll add next time will be mushrooms and kimchee. i still have leftover wrappers, so i might try making a vegetarian version as an experiment for my vegetarian readers. =)