Salad Spectacular week!

Since we didn't have enough veggies over the weekend, I decided to try making bunch of different salads this week!

Warm Vegetable salad: zucchini, yellow squash, filet green beans, red onions w/ red wine vinegar, shaved garlic, sea salt, and olive oil

Shaved asparagus salad: asparagus, multicolor quinoa, green onions, avocado w/ lime vinagrette (and pan cooked chicken on the side!)

Amaranth greens stir fried w/ garlic (and garlic lemon parsley shrimp on the side)

Roasted broccolini w/ hazelnuts, meyer lemon zest

Roasted beets w/ orange, spinach, pistachios

Memorial Day weekend in Socal

For Memorial Day weekend, we drove down to socal for my cousin's wedding.  Going to socal means good times hanging out with my cousins, eating tons of food and usually not enough exercising. In addition to wedding festivities, we managed to go to a lot of new and old food places.

Favorite boba place in San Gabriel: Half and Half!  Iced milk w/ pudding, caramel, and honey boba.  So good!

Shinsengumi for ramen.  Highly recommended by a hs friend of mine.  This is the most efficient ramen joint I've met so far.  There is only one flavor of ramen, which you customize what toppings you want (pork, egg, bamboo shoots, corn, spinach, mushrooms, bean sprouts, etc), how strong the broth, how much oil, and how chewy the noodles.  They also have spicy pastes and miso and butter to add flavor.  So you can pretty much get whatever you want!

Pho Lu (found on Yelp) in Garden Grove for a late dinner (we got there around 10 pm, and they were still packed!).  The beef tendon in the soup was really good!

Woori Korean restaurant (found on Yelp): Bone broth and beef soup with noodles, the ox blood hangover soup, a mung bean pancake, and japchae.  The ox blood hangover soup was really interesting.  The ox blood itself was kind of fluffy and porous, very different from the chewy sort of jello like consistency that I've had before in Chinese congee.  I think I still don't like eating blood very much, but at least I tried it!

And last, but not least: 85 deg C for coffee mochi red bean bread, taro bread, and mountain green tea for the drive back up!

The most delicious salad ever (or at least in a long while)

Some friends are moving to D.C. soon, so we went out to dinner with them on a random Tuesday night.  Parking was hard to find.  I had to circle multiple lots!  Ok, it also happened to be Cinco de Mayo, so I'm not sure if that contributed to it or not.  Who knew that Sunnyvale downtown is actually crowded and happening now? 

Anyway, they're vegan/vegetarian, and were raving about the Fattoush Salad at Dish Dash, saying that it's the best fattoush salad they've ever had.  And they've traveled to Turkey and other Mediterranean countries before!  So of course we decided to try it as well, and it really was amazing!

Fattoush salad is a Lebanaese bread salad with a pomegranate molasses and sumac dressing.  Typically there are many greens in it, tomatoes, cucumbers, and toasted pita chips (this is the bread component).

Naturally, the first thing I did after getting home was write down the list of things I saw and tasted in the salad, so I could try reproducing it over the weekend!  Here's my first attempt:

Romaine lettuce, mixed greens, cherry tomatoes, persian cucumbers, radishes, italian parsley, cilantro, mint, and pita chips!  Not bad for a first attempt, but maybe I put too much lemon juice into the dressing because it was rather sour.

Now it's been another week, and attempt #2 is definitely improved.  Or at least that's what Geoff told me.  (I added some honey into the dressing mixture so now it's less sour and has more depth!)

Tonight I also tried Nom Nom Paleo's "Green Chicken" Recipe and asked Geoff to grill it outside.  They turned out pretty well!  And I also roasted some potatoes with rosemary (but there's no picture of this because we enjoyed eating them too much).

A tale of many vegetables

I haven't posted in a while, but I have taken pictures of food, so here goes.

A couple of weekends ago we went backpacking, but of course I didn't want to miss out on the weekly pilgrimage to the farmer's market.  So we went really quickly on Saturday morning before heading out to hike and camp.  I picked up many kinds of leafy green things, and STRAWBERRIES!!

 Above: (left to right) Asparagus, radishes, mizuna, lacinato kale, spinach, and rainbow swiss chard.

The best part of backpacking is that we saw a banana slug eating a mushroom!

After we got home from backpacking, I tried to make some more Burmese food.  I made a chickpea soup with lemongrass and ginger (topped with cilantro), and a bean soup with shallots, and a beef curry with shallots.  This was served over rice with mizuna stir fried with a splash of soy sauce and meyer lemon :)

During the week, the asparagus from my farmer's market bounty got grilled, along with some red bell pepper and chicken in a pomegranate molasses marinade.  I really like the tart tangy fruity flavor of pomegranate molasses!!

The rainbow swiss chard, I sauteed with raisins and pistachios (because I don't currently have any pine nuts, otherwise it would've been pine nuts!)

The kale I threw into a a black beluga lentil stew, with onions and onions, sweet potatoes, and carrots.  This would be a really good stew for a cold winter day, but it's spring now!

Lately I've been trying to eat veggies as part of breakfast too, usually along with an egg over easy on top of mashed up honey nut squash.  I prepare spinach pretty simply by stir frying the spinach with a bit of sesame oil and salt.  Radishes I like to flash steam with a touch of salt and sugar, and if I'm feeling like putting in more effort, dried shrimps and/or dried scallops!