A visit to the garden!

After hiking yesterday, my friend let me wander into her mom's garden and harvest some vegetables to take home.  How nice!

I was fascinated by how little cucumbers and zucchinis are actually the "fruit" of the plants and they ave female flowers on their butts.  They only start growing bigger if fertilized by the male flowers, so hopefully next time I'll get to try help out with that!  (can you find the baby zucchini below?)

In addition to getting to take home some cucumbers and tomato, I was super excited about the white radishes.  I'm not really sure what kind they are, but they're small and round with lots of leafy greens, and they were growing half in the dirt and half out of the dirt!

I took them home and gave them a good washing before roasting them!

Delicious with flaky sea salt.

Adapted from April Bloomfield's 'a girl and her greens' book:

Roasted whole tokyo turnips recipe

16 whole tokyo turnips with leaves still attached
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons flaky sea salt

Preheat oven to 425 F.
Halve each turnip lengthwise (since my white radishes were bigger and of different sizes, I tried to cut them into pieces roughly the same size to make sure they cooked evenly)
Run under water to get rid of all the grit on the outside and inside the base of the greens.
Pat dry.
Pour the oil (I used bacon grease because I've been saving it in the fridge in a jar) into an ovenproof skillet, and set over medium high heat until smoking.
Put the turnips flat side down and cook until light golden brown (5-8 mins).
Make sure the greens are tucked into the pan and put it into the oven.
Roast until tender (you can insert a sharp knife with no resistance), turning occasionally so the greens wilt and crisp up evenly, and making sure the turnips don't get too brown in places.
Recipe said it should take 20-25 mins in the oven, it only took me ~10.  Maybe my pieces were smaller?
Remove from oven, and sprinkle on some salt to taste.

I think I got pretty darn close.  Here's the pic from the book:

Pizza pizza!

It was really nice to go out to our favorite pizza place on Friday night after a week of work.  It used to be walking distance from G's old place in Mountain View, but now that we live in Sunnyvale we don't go there as often as we'd like.

Pizzaria Napoletana serves authentic Neopolitan pizza from a wood fired oven.  I think the part I love the most is the tomato sauce.  If I could buy their sauce in a jar, I would.  The crust is really nice too, but because it's so thin in the middle, it gets soggy pretty easily from the tomato sauce.  The homemade sausages on top are also delicious!

I wish I could make pizza like this!

More salads and veggies

Most of the salads I've been making are adapted from a book I borrowed from the library, 'A Good Food Day' by Marco Canora.  So far everything has been pretty tasty (and I've been skipping ingredients that I might not have... hehe).

This week, I tried making more salads!

Thai style eggplant with basil and garlic: very tasty, but a tad pungent

Sugar snap pea salad with roasted hazelnuts, meyer lemon zest, and meyer lemon vinagrette:

Green beans with radishes, rosemary, and green onions: not a fan, it was kind of strange, would not make again

And without any recipes, just me mixing things together:
1. veggie stew: carrot, potato, celery, zucchini: very homey and nice depth of flavor from my homemade chicken broth

2. swiss chard frittata w/ onions, garlic, and random spices from the cabinet

Note: the baguette is from Acme bread.  It is a weekend staple from the farmer's market!

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!