Post Valentine

So how was your Valentine's Day this year? Did you do anything special? Di you get lots of presents? Did you get lots of chocolates? Did you get a fancy dinner?

What ever it is that you did or however you celebrated this day of hearts, I hope that you are full of love today. If not full of love, then at least full of something good like this 'hearty' chunk of lamb that we cooked up in the kitchen for LaPiS, the weekly food photo blogging event.


If you're not a meat eater, it's downright scary, I know. But if you love meat like we do, then you can just forget the treadmills for a while and enjoy a big plateful of this baby!

Noodles & Tarts

Happy Sunday! Here's a couple of healthy and delicious suggestions for your Sunday dinner. I'm making a roast beef today just because Sunday has gotten to be a roasting day around here. The following dishes are more like weekday dishes for us. They are quick and easy to make, delicious and satisfying. Give them a try if you like.



This is Curried Chicken Over Rice Noodles. I kind of made it up as I went along but it came out quite well if I do say so myself :)

“Photo credit: One Fork, One Spoon”

Earlier in the summer we had an abundant harvest of Swiss Chard from our spring planting and that was when I discovered this recipe for making them into the pie or to put it more fancy like, a tart :)

Click here for the recipe for Swiss Chard Tart.

Don't go running looking for diet pills that work just yet, these two dishes, while not exactly low fat are actually very healthy. The Noodles has hidden veggies in it and very small amount of oil and while the amount of oil in the tart may seem like a lot, keep in mind that it's Olive oil and it's supposed to be good for you. We all have to have a little fat in our diet. We just have to consume it, like everything else, in moderation.

Get Fancy with Grey Poupon

I got these in the mail earlier in the week and we've had a week full of mustardy dishes. Luckily, I haven't heard any complaints yet. But, they are used to it. Grey Poupon mustard is a staple in our cupboard as is probably the case in most household. It's just that since I have been tasked to give an honest review of these products, we've been experimenting all week to see which one taste better and how many ways we can use it.

My personal favorite way of using mustard is not with hotdog as most would probably expect, although a hotdog without mustard is not worth the bun it sits on, I like it best with corned beef. Boiled corned beef with cabbage and potatoes with a side of mustard would have me sighing before night's end. This week, for this experiment, we've used mustard in sandwiches, mustard roasted chicken, and steaks with mustard sauce.

We've all decided that both the coarse ground and spicy brown mustards are both good in their own way but have decidedly different uses in our opinion. No onle liked the coarse ground mustard in sandwiches. The mustard seeds had a bad habit of lodging between your teeth. The smooth spicy brown mustard works best in sandwiches. The dish with coarse ground mustard seed that was a hit with everyone was our experimental roasted chicken.

To make mustard roasted chicken, take a whole chicken and wash it inside and out then dry it with a paper towel to soak up excess moisture. In a small bowl, combine about 4 tablespoons of coarse ground mustard, a teaspoon of kosher salt, half a teaspoon of garlic powder and the juice from one lemon. Slather this mixture all over the chicken including the insides. Place chicken on a roasting rack and pan, bake in a pre-heated 400 degrees F oven for 30 minutes. Turn the heat down to 350 degrees and bake for another hour and fifteen minutes. The skin will be crispy and mustardy and the insides will be good and moist. Yumm!

Even without having been tasked for this review, I would highly recommend Grey Poupon mustards for your kitchen.

LP 22 Round Up is Up

I was honored to host last month's round Lasang Pinoy, a monthly food blogging event that features Filipino Cuisine. Last month's theme was all about RICE. If you love rice too like I do, make sure to drop by our kitchen to see what's been cooking.

For my own entries, I tried out three rice dishes that I love but have never cooked before:

Totong Balatong, Kutsinta and Puto.

Cooked in Our Kitchen: Caramel Cake

My husband always talks about caramel cake from his childhood. However, his aunt who is supposed to be make the best ever caramel cake, is very stingy with her recipe. Howwelll..... So, I'm on a quest to perfect this cake. This, not the first attempt, is not perfect. The cake is good and fluffy and moist, no problem there. However, the frosting still leaves a lot to be desired. It was too sweet for me and didn't have enough caramel flavor. Husband is being nice; he said it's almost there. I'm determined to get there one of these days. If you have any tips on how to improve this frosting, let me know.

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's three a.m. on Thanksgiving day and I'm up blogging because I can't go back to sleep and it's too early for me to start cooking.

Husband found just the right size turkey for our family of five, he found a 8 pound fresh turkey, so I don't even have to defrost it! I know, it's cute, I almost panicked when I saw the little turkey. It doesn't seem big enough, especially when you're used to cooking twenty pounders. But it's just the five of us again this year, so I think this will be perfect. I can cook a pork roast by the weekend. hehe!

Visit our food blog for recipes. I'll be posting new ones that I try out this year. If you are still looking for recipes to make, just put thanksgiving in the search box and you'll find recipes we've cooked up in the past.

Cooked in Our Kitchen: Carrot Soup

Thanksgiving is in a couple of days. Are you ready? If you'd like a simple yet elegant starter for your dinner and still keep to the fall colors theme, Carrot soup may be a good recipe to try. I cooked this one up recently for my sick daughter who wanted something soothing for her throat.

I still haven't made up my mind what to make for Thanksgiving. The girls are not being too crazy about turkey right now. They actually suggested going to dim sum instead! Oh the horror!

A thanksgiving dinner without turkey? Could it be possible? Hmmmm....

What I want for Christmas...

I bought my first stand up mixer when I was single and first moved to my own place. I was just learning to cook then and that little mixer was the perfect tool for a kitchen. It was called the kitchen center. It did just about everything, and I still have it today. Almost eighteen years later my poor mixer is finally reaching it's end. It's like loosing an old family member. I almost hate to start looking for a replacement, but it's one of those inevitable things in life, you just gotta do it.

When I start looking at any Eclectrics® Mixer though, I start getting that first date flutter in the pit of my stomach. It could also be that everytime I start looking at kitchen gadgets I start thinking of food and start getting hungry. Who knows, but I do get excited over kitchen gadgets.

The Hamilton Beach® Mixer gets my hearbeat a skipping. This mixer has way more power than the one I have now and it comes in so many attractive colors. I am leaning towards the avocado colored one that they call apple colored. I like that retro color. I may even change the whole kitchens color motif to match this mixer.

I'm still not much of a baker, but I do like to bake every once in a while. One of our favorite cakes to make, and this is where Hamilton Beach® Stand Mixer can come in very handy, is my mother-in-law's Coconut Cake. The recipe is in our food blog. This is a holiday tradition in our house. My husband just has to have his mother's coconut cake.

To make the coconut cake, a stand up mixer is almost mandatory. Not only because the batter needs a good mixing in order to be fluffy and moist (it's three layers); its crowning glory is a meringue based frosting which requires whipping egg whites into stiff peaks, a daunting task for most cooks, but could be accomplished quite easy with a stand up mixer.

This mixer is definitely in my Christmas wishlist this year. Hopefully, Santa will think I am deserving of this gift :)

Soups!

OH man, it really has turned cold. We got our first freeze this morning and it just about dessimated our garden.

Cold weather always gets me thinking of soup. I'll be making something soupy tonight, that's for sure. The only thing I'm not sure of is, which one?

Sinigang - or sour soup as my girls like to call it. This is a soup that can be made with just about any type of meat or seafood and full of delicious vegetables. As with any soup, most of the flavor of any meat is in the bones that's why so many soup recipes ask for the bony cuts of meat. I have tried making this soup with fresh pork hocks, shrimps, and spare ribs.

Then there's always the Bean Soup - but I don't know that I have enough time to make some on a weekday. This is more like a weekend dish. Our favorite, besides Chili is White Bean Soup with Ham.

The Clone loves Leeks and Potato Soup, but the leeks in our garden aren't quite ready yet. She also likes Chicken and Corn Chowder which we have all the ingredients for.

I am in favor of Oxtail Soup myself. But that takes too long to cook.

Decisions, decisions....

So what's your favorite soup?

Cooked in Our Kitchen: Apple Cobler

It's fall, and you probably have apples laying around; but if you don't and you just have some apples in the fridge that you want to get rid off, try making this dump method.

I am a lazy baker so any dish where you don’t fuss over beating things and sifting things is my kind of baking. I didn’t want to be bothered with pie crust so I thought I would just dump things in a dish and bake; that’s how I came up with this concoction which is a combination of a Clafoutis recipe from Essential Desserts and a French Apple Cobbler recipe from Southernfood.about.com.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why don't I have more parties?

Before I even had my own place or got married, my mom used to drag us to different kinds of parties that were all designed to sell you one thing or another. You remember those, don't you? There were tupperware parties, princess house parties, health drink parties, cookware set parties, kitchen gadget parties, and god knows what other parties there were. My mom must have had lots of friends or had plenty of spare time because I don't know how she did it! I sure don't have the time or money to be doing these things. I get invited all the time, mostly by people from work, and I just have to decline. Most of them are either evenings when I have to be home with the family, or weekends when I have to be home with the family :)

In Our House and beyond

I have to apologize I haven't been bloghopping lately. For you who keep visiting anyway, thank you. The girls are almost out of school now, and my interns are off in the field, so I should have more time to blog and visit other blogs soon. To my regular reads, I miss reading your blogs. I know I'll have lots to catch up on.


As the weather gets nicer, we are out in the garden more often and we are getting more inspired to cook.

Asi cooked up this georgeous looking dessert In Our Kitchen. It had so many steps that it's one of those recipes I would never have dared to attempt especially since it uses so many darn dishes! You know how I hate washing dishes. But, Asi said she would do all the work and she would just need very little little help. I said go for it so long as you clean after yourself. And she did! She did it all by herself from start to finish, and it was delicious too. It was a great after dinner treat.