Bay Area Eats!

Before our trip to the States, I told Joe our goal was not to waste a single meal on mediocre food. Joe (and our friends) endured my obsessive compulsiveness – Joe even had a look at my excel sheet and countless articles (yes, I make excel sheets for vacations). In the end I think we did a GREAT job of accomplishing our goal! The only slight failure was at Joe’s fave steakhouse, where I ordered the wrong cow part (turns out I don’t know much about ordering steak) and the restaurant also made it way overdone. Other than that, I was fully satisfied if not in LOVE with every meal we ate!

A picture diary of the best meals —

Gather – 2200 Oxford Street Berkeley, CA 94704
At the end of my trip someone asked me what my top rated meals were – this was one of the top two. All organic, and some vegan, it was an adventure ordering and trying each dish. I expected the usual healthy dishes, but the menu was something else, and each dish had a different flavor I had never experienced before. It was a real joy to try a restaurant like this!

Vegan Charcuterie – one of the most memorable dishes

Dessert Menu

Roasted Strawberries

Pavlova

Delica – 1 Ferry Building # 45 San Francisco, CA 94111
One of my best friends is a macro vegan, and it was actually pretty fun exploring the restaurants that would accommodate her diet. Luckily SF has tons of choices. This was delicious, light, and pretty satisfying. We grabbed lunch to go and sat by the water for a picnic. A perfect first day in the city.

Charthouse – 444 Cannery Row, Monterey, CA 93940
We did a mini road trip and went to Monterey for a night. Charthouse is right by the ocean, a fancy place that lived up to its appearance. The food (especially seafood) was great and very fresh!

Asparagus appetizer

Stuffed mushrooms- delicious!

My crab cakes – I usually prefer not to order crab cakes as a main, but this was surprisingly amazing and not too filling!

Cioppino – sorry about the unsteady hand, I was too eager to dig into the food!

Delish!

At the Marriott in Monterey, we got breakfast in Bed – Look at this huge breakfast for two… We ate and ate, then went to the gym and both got stomach aches because we ate too much.

J.Lohr Winery – 6169 Airport Road, Paso Robles, CA 93446
During our road trip, I had my first belated winery experience- first up and most notable was J.Lohr, Joe’s favorite wine EVER. I have to admit, even though I’ve had it before, I was surprisingly impressed by just how great the wine was after going through all the tastings.

Gorgeous day out

Tacos – Random store in Paso
In between wineries we stopped at a little nondescript store to get tacos for lunch. After having this taco, I will never again want a taco in Hong Kong. It was life changing I tell you. Going back to being asked what my top meals of the trip were, this was the other of the top 2. My next mission is to try to emulate this at home… using HK ingredients…

The menu

Quesedilla

My amazing taco

Approximately 5 minutes later – all gone

Had never tried fried pork fat before – so sad to admit it was actually quite good

King City BBQ – Not available to the general public
One of the items on Joe’s USA agenda was to drop by King City and have the Lopez family bbq. We did just that, and yes, it was amazing as Joe always says. Breakfast the next morning was amazing as well, but I was too engrossed to remember to take a pic.

Joe’s cooking – Not available to the general public hehe
Joe is a great chef and has a few signature Chinese dishes that are amazing. Liz, Joe and I gathered together to cook dinner one afternoon – just like old times. I love cooking with Liz who always teaches me something new about cooking each time.

Joe’s twice cooked pork

Spicy green beans! My favorite of joe’s dishes

Ma po tofu

Joe’s cousin made a great beef with carrot dish (not sure what the name in Chinese is)

Dessert from Berkeley Bowl!

Nantucket – 601 Port St, Crockett, CA 94525
Before we arrived in the States, Joe already said he wanted to take me to Nantucket, a seafood restaurant Joe’s family had been going for years. We met up with my aunt at this cute little eatery under a bridge – very obscure but with great food!

Calamari – Never seen such huge sheets of calamari

Cioppino – excellently flavored, probably one of the best I’ve tasted.

Chicken burger

Linguine with clams – so good!

Wood Tavern – 6317 College Avenue Oakland, CA 94618
Amid hectically trying to catch up with our friends, we managed to sneak in date night at Wood Tavern. I had read a few good reviews, and when our friends wrote down a list of restaurants to try for date night, I recognized the name.

A cozy little place in Berkeley

Very lively after hours!

A new menu every night

Appetizer – Crispy Pork Belly. I had read a review of this dish before going to the restaurant so I knew it’d be good!

Bread appetizer – free and a little disappointing since it was nothing special

Pan Roasted Half Chicken – very good but admittedly a little on the salty side

Steak – very good!

Strawberry Fields drink – SO strong!!!

Crepevine – 1600 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA 94709-1634
I’m lucky to have friends who accommodate my desire for great food. As if I wasn’t demanding enough, I requested brunch at a place with outdoor seating and they found the perfect place for it!

I have to admit this eggs benedict wasn’t really one of the best I’ve had – the egg was overcooked, but the flavor was great.

Philz Coffee – Various locations
Admittedly I do think coffee in Hong Kong is on the whole better and more “gourmet” than coffee in the States. But when our friend mentioned this place, I had to try it. And, living up to expectations, it was very strong – I was wide awake til late that night!

The Menu

Revival Bar + Kitchen – 2102 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94704
We ended the trip with a great dinner. One thing I think is missing in HK is farm to fork restaurants.

The menu – so hard to choose from!

Flatbread

Love kale

My pasta – a little salty but definitely fresh!

A great roasted spring onion soup – very fresh as expected

More flatbread!

And even more flatbread

This was one of the best vacations, made even better by my amazing friends and family who accommodated my demands for great food

Homemade Moroccan Spiced Chicken with Mint Yoghurt Sauce

This is one of those dishes that sounds fancy but actually requires very few steps. It also doesn’t require many ingredients but living in a place like Hong Kong, which has very few obscure ingredients, this dish proved more expensive to make than I thought. It was a very satisfying meal regardless.

I used this recipe liz sent me, but I went to the supermarket later in the day and I think the cilantro had run out by then. I also didn’t use any measuring cups or spoons – just measured all my ingredients by eye and it still worked out perfectly! Just proves how easy this is. My version of the recipe:

Ingredients
1/2 cup greek yogurt
1 tbs olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 teaspoons paprika
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground pepper
3 palm-sized chicken breasts

Mix all marinade ingredients in a bowl. Add the chicken, covering it thoroughly with the marinade. Cover and let marinade for 6 hours.
Heat a wide flat pan, and grill the chicken breasts til cooked thoroughly – roughly 5 minutes each side.

—

While I was grilling the chicken, I quickly made a mint yoghurt sauce. This was SO much easier than I expected, and yet again, quite expensive to make in HK due to the cost of fresh mint leaves. I didn’t follow a recipe, but read about 5 of them before I started making it to get the gist. Turned out to have a very refreshing and pure taste against the chicken which had a bit of a stronger flavor. Perfect match! My recipe below;

1/3 cup Greek yoghurt
1/2 small cucumber, seeds removed and diced
Roughly 3 tbs finely chopped mint leaves

Mix everything together thoroughly – and you’re done! I realized afterwards that I could have added some more mint, which I’ve adjusted in this recipe.

And to top it all off, I grilled some asparagus with salt and pepper. The asparagus only needed about 4 minutes on the already-heated grill to be perfectly done. Gotta get that fiber in!

Bruschetta, Guac, and Fish Tacos

I meant to post this weeks ago but have been so busy I forgot! Since when did I work 11 hour days and enjoy it?! … And yes I realize 11 hour days are nothing out of the ordinary for Hong Kong corporate life, but I’ve had unusually regular hours for all my previous jobs so this is all new to me. Though I love it, I’ve found it hard to really want to cook after work – too little time and being brain dead really breeds intense laziness after hours. Plus I just signed up for another race… which means having to get up early to run before work.

With work and life in general keep us all busy, it’s been hard to find time to catch up with girlfriends. So in order to catch up we decided to cook dinner together and stay in to watch movies. So much fun!

 

I will love guac as long as I live- and this hit the spot

Prepping the fish tacos – so much easier than I thought. Just combined lime juice, salt, and pepper, soaked the fish in it, and pan fried it.

I was so impressed with Liz’s bruschetta! SO GOOD.

Adding the bruschetta topping to the buttered and toasted bread

Cheese topping!

Finished product- amazing

Good food, good company!

Homemade Red Velvet Mini Cupcakes

My obsession started when my ex-colleague Tara made red velvet cupcakes and gave me some at work; then Sharon told me she was going to make some, so I decided it was my turn today. After desperately searching for a simple recipe with minimal ingredients, as well as a recipe that didn’t use red food coloring, I accepted defeat and used both food coloring and all the usual long list of ingredients.

Last week when Sharon told me she was going to make them, I told her to use beets as red coloring, which I’ve read many times worked. Well… it DIDN’T work and she sent me a picture to prove it! OOPS! So I reluctantly bought red food coloring (gross) because I wanted my cupcakes to look legit. Sigh. I also had to buy vinegar which I was confused about as an ingredient; apparently the vinegar works with bicarbonate of soda to become fizzy and airy, making the cupcakes fluffy. It definitely worked!

I used this recipe pretty much to a T.

Because I used a mini muffin tin, and I only had one, baking these took FOREVER. There was so much batter and the batter barely lessened with each time I put the cupcakes in the oven!

Of course you have to add cream cheese frosting- I just mix about 1/3 cup butter, 2 cups powdered sugar, 8 oz cream cheese, and about 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. I never measure all of this though because cream cheese can frosting is subjective and can really be done according to how sweet you want it.

And cooking is best when your food is shared – I packed a box to share with my colleagues!

Homemade Kiwi Jam – and congratulations to Lizard!

Homemade jam always reminds me of one of my best friends Liz – actually, it reminds me of her mom because her mom always makes it. If you are wondering why I always speak of a “Liz” on my blog, it’s because she was one of the main people who sparked my interest in cooking. She used to make me sit with her in the kitchen in college while she made us dinner. I always ended up doing something relatively useless like stirring the pot, mainly because I didn’t know how to do anything cooking-related back then. So naturally most of the things I make now remind me of her. Well, Lizard and Carlos just got married! They are both so lucky to have each other! Carlos has taught me a bit about cooking as well, because he made some really great chicken one night for us. Nothing like impressing your girlfriend’s friends by cooking dinner for them while they are out shopping and having fun. So, a big congratulations to the two of them!

How fitting to write this now, as Lizard was the one who brought it to my attention that jamming is possible.
The task always seemed a bit daunting; jam just sounds so complicated. Well, I was wrong! It’s one of the easiest things to make with the fewest steps.

Karen came over one morning bringing sugar and jam jars. I had bought the fruit the night before, and that was it! That’s all you need for jam! We didn’t follow an exact recipe, but combined quite a few ideas from random recipes we found online, and actually just guessed the fruit/sugar ratio based on a few recipes. There seemed to be a common theme of possible additional ingredients in jam – fruity alcohol, lemon juice, and cinnamon. Neither of us had fruity alcohol on hand, and cinnamon sounded to veer too far from being an original jam recipe (we wanted a basic jam for our jam experiment). We did decide to add lemon juice last minute just for fun. Everything turned out perfectly, the jam tastes great and we were able to avoid using gelatin or any coagulating ingredients!

Our recipe:

12 kiwis
1 apple
500 grams of super fine white sugar
Juice of 1 lemon

*To prepare and sanitize jam jars, boil open jars with lids in a big pot of water.

1. Spoon the kiwi meat out of its skin into a big pot; add the sugar into the pot
2. Dice apples into small cubes and put in separate bowl
3. Bring the kiwi and sugar mixture to high heat, stirring frequently. Allow the mixture to bubble and boil. Scoop off any foam that forms on top (we didn’t have any strangely). Boil and continue mixing frequently for about 15-20 minutes
4. Add diced apple and juice of 1 lemon into the pot. Continue boiling another 5-10 minutes, until the desired consistency is achieved
6. Separate into jars and allow to cool before putting lid on.

ENJOY!

Homemade Lemon Bars

During my 2 weeks of staycation between jobs, I’ve had tons of time to run errands I never get a chance to do – got my clothes altered, cleaned my closet, organized my shoes, fixed my watch, got my glasses prescriptions done, met up with many people I never have time to eat lunch/dinner with, and have been able to cook! It has been so much fun, especially since I’ve had so much time to run to the supermarket, get ingredients ready, do all my researching for recipes… I am loving this time off!

I used to love eating raspberry bars, lemon bars, and blueberry bars in college. This was my first attempt at making it from scratch; it turned out very well and proved much easier to make than I thought! Used a recipe online but altered some of the ratios a bit – there is TONS of butter in the original recipe, as well as quite a bit of sugar. I reduced both. My recipe below;

Ingredients
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
3/4 cup softened butter
4 eggs
1 1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup lemon juice
Lemon zest of 1 full lemon

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
2. Mix 2 cups flour and confectioner’s sugar together. Cut in butter until dough is crumbly. Press into a flat square baking pan (recipes recommend 9 x 13 inch pan)
3. Bake 15 minutes or until golden brown
4. Beat together eggs, sugar, 4 tbs flour, lemon juice, and lemon rind. Pour the mixture over the baked crust.
5. Bake the bars another 15 minutes, or until the lemon topping has set. (NOTE: it took me slightly less then 15 mins for the topping to set, but I kept it in there for a full 15 minutes. I also reduced the heat to about 320F after I added the lemon topping in. Careful not to overcook as the lemon part can turn out quite tough; mine turned out tougher than I wanted)
6. Sprinkle confectioner’s sugar on top when cooked. Serve!

Enjoy! Even my mom who doesn’t like sweets really enjoyed this

Homemade Pizza

We planned this on a whim, about an hour before I got off work. I got a message about making dinner, so we quickly came up with the idea of pizza, and came up with a list of ingredients that each person had to buy on the way home. The whole idea (at least in MY head, since I was exhausted) was to make it a quick and easy dinner, without much fuss. This meant not wanting to make things from scratch as I usually like. A quick search on google told me that Hong Kong supermarkets don’t readily have pizza dough on sale, and as I didn’t want to bother making it from scratch, I remembered having heard you can use pita bread instead. It turned out perfectly, and definitely exceeded my expectations! A perfect weeknight dinner – quick, easy, and SO yummy!

We bought some mini pitas, so everyone had a couple pizzas each. Needless to say I was stuffed by the end of the night.

Had to start off with lots of chopping. We got bell peppers, olives, arugula leaves, pepperoni, sausages, onions, cheese (cheddar and mozzarella), and tomatoes, as well as store-bought tomato sauce. We first took pitas, smeared tomato sauce over it, and added all ingredients as we liked.

The great thing about using mini pita breads was that everyone could decorate their pizzas as they liked

Popped them in the oven for about 10 minutes each batch. The pizza smelled so good, we could only watch as it baked!

The final product! So satisfying. Definitely making this again sometime… maybe with more home-made ingredients next time.

Homemade Eggbread Grilled Cheese

I didn’t make this dish up, but this was created and cooked in my kitchen so I claim rights to post about it. If this dish sounds incredibly filling to you, you’re right. But it’s also delicious and definitely worth a try.

1. Cut a hole into two slices of bread

2. Crack an egg in the middle of the bread, wait for it to cook slightly so that the egg binds to the bread. Then flip the eggbread over and cook slightly more. Do this to 2 slices of bread. Set one slice aside, keeping the other one on the pan

3. Lay lots of cheddar cheese on the bread – my take is the more the better!

4. Top off the cheese with the other slice of eggbread

Enjoy!

India – Gastronomical Highlights

Over Christmas and New Years, we spent about 9 days in northern India touring a new city or town a day, and spending every night on the train. It was an amazing and very eye opening experience, different from any trip that I’ve ever taken. The food, unfortunately, wasn’t always as I would have hoped. I guess this was limited to the fact that we ate most nights on the train as it whistled off to the next destination (don’t get me wrong, food on the train was good, just not outstanding). Lunch was usually at 5 star hotels for fear of us getting sick. The two best meals I would say were on the first day before the train tour, and the last day after leaving the tour, when we found our own meals upon recommendations from hotels/tour guides. The most satisfying foods during our entire trip? Masala tea (the one made on board on the train was the best) and garlic naan! I miss them already!

Below, a photo journal of all my favorite dishes and meals!

Lots of lamb curries

Bitter Gourd, fried

Really good juicy chicken!

Love all their breads/naans/rotis

Bone marrow, fried

Masala tea! Deliiicious

Took a photo of this because the carrots there are a different color! They’re also quite sweet but don’t have much of the carrot taste I’m used to.

Typical after-dinner herbs and sugar to clear the breath

Garlic Naan

Typical condiments given pre-meal

I’ve never really craved Indian food occasionally but I do enjoy it when I eat it. Now I actually crave garlic naan and masala chai!

2 Things to do With Maple Syrup

One of my best friends lives in Pennsylvania, bought maple syrup at a state fair, and mailed it all the way here to Hong Kong! I am loved. I actually hadn’t eaten maple syrup in YEARS before this. I don’t even know how good the maple syrup is here at supermarkets, so I was thoroughly excited.

My first priority was the classic choice – maple syrup and pancakes! Usually I eat my pancakes with a flavored honey that we bought in Hokkaido Japan one time. This time I had the real all-American pancakes.

Pancakes wtih maple syrup

Just as delicious as I remembered!

Since I had close to the whole bottle remaining, and not enough buttermilk left to make many more pancakes, I decided to make Maple Cookies! I haven’t been in much of a Christmas mood this year, maybe because it was uncharacteristically hot in Hong Kong til the end of November. I decided some kind of cookie would make me feel the Christmas spirit. It didn’t end up working. But the cookies were great! As always, I used a maple cookie recipe from allrecipes – but changed it up slightly as I normally do. My recipe below-

Maple Cookies

Maple Cookies

3/4 cup butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar (recipe calls for packed brown sugar; I used granulated)
1 egg
1 cup maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup whole gran flour
3 cups white flour

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Line tray/cookie sheet with wax paper
2. In a large bowl, cream the butter and brown sugar. Add the egg, syrup and vanilla. Mix until well blended.
3. Mix together the flour, salt and baking soda. Stir into mixture until well blended.
4. Shape into 1 inch balls. Place on cookie sheets about 2 inches apart and flatten slightly. Bake roughly 10-12 minutes; cool on wire rack. (The original recipe calls for 8-10 minutes of baking; my dough was a bit too undercooked with this timing, and my oven is typically very strong!)