Labels

Appetizer (2) Beef (4) Bread (1) Chicken (1) Dessert (1) Fish (1) Fruit (3) Low Calorie (2) Main Course (6) Salad (2) Sweet Bread (1)

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Thai Cashew Chicken

2 boneless skinless chicken breasts
2-3 cloves garlic
2 celery stalks
1 medium onion
1 bell pepper
1 cup cashews
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (for frying)

For the Sauce
1 tablespoon chili sauce (for a spicy version, substitute 1 teaspoon chili paste or 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes)
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoons white sugar

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Dressing Up Zucchini Bread

Skip to a specific section of this post:
Basic Zucchini Bread recipe
Lemon Pistachio Zucchini Bread
Orange Walnut Zucchini Bread
Guava Coconut Zucchini Bread

It's Fall, and that means finding creative ways to use up all of the zucchini in the garden. While I don't currently have a garden, I still can't pass up purchasing a giant zucchini squash at the farmer's market. One of my favorite recipes for zucchini is zucchini bread, and one of my favorite things to do with sweet breads is to play around with new flavor combinations.

New flavor combinations aren't as easy to come up with as it might seem, and finding a good pairing can be tricky at times. However, once you find something that works, it can be pretty easy to make tweaks here and there to get something entirely new but playing on the same theme. For example, last year I came up with recipes for Orange Walnut and Lemon Pistachio Zucchini bread (I will share them below). These are variations of the same theme; a citrus flavor paired with a nut flavor. Even experienced cooks fall short sometimes, though. At the same time I came up with those recipes, I tried a lime coconut version that just didn't have a very good flavor. Don't be afraid to fail sometimes; the sucesses make it worthwhile. If you start with small changes, like changing the flavor ingredient but nothing else, you're a lot more likely to get a favorable outcome.

For this round of zucchini bread, I made the orange walnut and lemon pistachio recipes from last year along with two experimental recipes: guava coconut and chocolate cherry swirl. The chocolate cherry didn't come out very well at all, so I won't be sharing the recipe here, but the guava is definitely one of my new favorites. I asked Adam which he preferred, and he liked the orange walnut and guava coconut best.

Friday, October 12, 2012

I've got a quick, "about this blog" blurb on the side of this page, but I wanted to go into a little more detail about my plans for the blog.  It seems that all of my friends are either really good at cooking or really intimidated by it, and I know that when I was still learning it was really frustrating to try and understand vague wording in recipes.  Not to mention, a lot of recipes out there assume you know a lot of things already, like how to brown meat or how to sauté.

My plan with this blog is to take a different approach and describe cooking techniques with more precise wording and photos.  I also plan to give as much background information as I can to help you to understand why things work the way they do.  I might not be able to anticipate all of the questions you might have, so feel free to send any questions my way.

Also, expect a lot of changes in the look and layout; it's still a work in progress. :)