Ogahi, made with Azuki Bean Paste

Ever had daifuku? It’s magical. Little balls of dough gently cradling delightful globs of sweet bean paste. So I was inspired about a year or so and purchased a bag of red azuki beans (sweet beans of the Japanese dessertey variety), with stern intentions of making daifuku for myself.
A year later, I finally get around [...]

Overcooked versus Undercooked Food

So there was this discussion about brownies going on, after having just baked a delightful batch of not quite chocolatey enough brownies. See, undercooked brownies are always superior to any other sort of brownies, as it is the only real way to guarantee that the brownies will be appropriately squishy. It’s not that no-gooey brownies [...]

Empanada Pocket Things

I’ve been thinking about meat pies lately. That, and a Hot Pocket that was actually satisfying. Sadly, they are no longer the furtive pleasure they once were at age 16 or thereabouts, they’ve evolved to this sad sad pocket filled with more air then anything else. So I’m all like ‘I can beat that, I’ll [...]

Mango with Sweet Rice

Yeah, so I had the worst diarrhea ever recently. I blame this stuff, personally.

Mango and rice, seems harmless, eh? My bowels would disagree.
Luckily, it was rather an average creation, so it wasn’t too painful to trash the rest of it. My mistake was merging a bunch of different recipes together into the form that seems [...]

Vietnamese Garden Rolls

So at some point recently, a legion of lazy carrots invaded my fridge. They refuse to leave. So, inevitably, I’ve been attempting to figure out things to do with said carrots. I find raw carrots by themselves bland and boring, and cooked carrots by themselves are mildly repulsive. Nonetheless, the part of me that is [...]

Homemade French Fries

Potatoes are a beautiful thing. Spudtastic, even. Spudilicious. Spudariffic. And a whole slew of other words I could totally make up if I felt like it.
I made these babies. Sliced them up, fried them in a pan with oil, sprinkled them with various seasonings, and dipped them lovingly in ketchup right before they got [...]

Chicken Curry with Coconut Milk

So I got this chicken, see. And I’ve been fantasizing about things involving coconut milk for awhile, now. And I had all this basil that was just rarin’ to get gnawed upon. So it follows that, despite all my best intentions, a chicken curry would be made.
And I think I figured it out – I [...]

Lentil Curry

So this was technically supposed to be soup. I, however, am a non-believer. I was baffled that the recipe actually expected me to fit several quarts of water into a large saucepan. Apparently it’s definition of ‘large’ does not mesh well with mine. This baby took 2 hours to cook (compared to the recipe’s paltry [...]

Green Papaya Salad

So every time I’ve eaten green papaya salad, I’ve gotten sick to my stomach. The first time I ate it was when I’d up and decided to make it myself, not long after having discovered the fabulous joys of Vietnamese salads. See, I was at this party, and this dude Chad burbled on to me [...]

Chocolate Chip Brownie Cheesecake Dealio

So this was an exercise in ridiculousness that ended up being an exercise in bloat. But then again, so goes many things.
See, I ended up with an unexpected block of cheesecake, due to parentals leaving town for awhile and not wishing to throw out perfectly good groceries. So like any red-blooded American, my immediate [...]

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