Whenever I think of Southeast Asian desserts, mango sticky rice is probably at the top of my list for things that come to mind. Glutinous rice with ripe, fresh mango, and this salty coconut milk, the contrast and flavors are very different than what most people would associate with desserts. Some variations have toasted sesame…
Tag: Cooking
Dratini Tteok
Tteok are Korean rice cakes that are eaten in both savory and sweet applications. They are quite similar to mochi, and have a delicious chewy texture to them. One of the more common savory applications of tteok is tteokbokki, which literally translates to stewed rice cakes. The cakes are usually stewed in a spicy, kimchi-gochujang…
(Shiny) Torchic Sundae
This recipe came about because I had way too many persimmons and I basically was desperate to get rid of them. So I figured, why not make an ice cream with them? Persimmons are sweet, almost creamy, and very jammy when ripe, which are nice characteristics to incorporate into an ice cream base. The skin…
Swablu Hummingbird Sundae
Back in 2002 when I played Pokemon Sapphire, a much younger Fred adored a Pokemon called Swablu. Swablu is a blue bird-like Pokemon with white, cloud-like wings. It is classified as the Cotton Bird Pokemon, and evolves into Altaria, which honestly looks like a bigger blue bird with cloud-wings, but is somehow a Dragon-type Pokemon….
Blonde Chocolate Crumb Cake Doughnuts
I would be lying if I said this recipe was not just a crumb or coffee cake baked with a hole in it. That’s literally the recipe. However, there is something doubly nostalgic about a crumb cake that also looks like a doughnut, since those are the two coffee shop staple desserts you would usually…
Pork and Miso Cream Stew
This stew is me throwing almost every umami-developing technique I have in the book(minus dried mushrooms, tomatoes, or cheese rinds) into a pot of Japanese-styled cream stew. I have made pork cream stews in the past, but I was always disappointed by the color of the cream. I had envisioned this light, pale color, but…
Apple Crostata with Dutch Crust
I literally only came up with this recipe because I had a ton of apples I needed to use up. So. Many. Apples. And while I could have dumped all of my proverbial apple-eggs into one basket, and make one colossal apple dessert, that seems lame and kind of unoriginal. I would rather stretch out…
Sloth-acado Eclairs
So for my Sylvie(if you watched my audition on season 12, you will better remember her as “Fred’s Friend” who was making all of that commentary about my chocolate LOL)’s birthday, I wanted to make a fun dessert that was unlike anything I have previously attempted. Sylvie is obsessed with this sweet passionfruit-avocado tart that…
Rowlet Inarizushi
When I was a kid who did not like raw fish yet, I found myself ordering only three things whenever we would go out for sushi: cucumber rolls, tamagoyaki(Japanese omelet), and inarizushi. Inari refers to these puffed tofu skins that are based in a sweet soy mixture, giving them a sweet, smoky, and almost salty…
Red and gold(en syrup) tang yuan
If you are Chinese or Taiwanese and do not know what tang yuan are, then I truly have seen it all., Tang yuan(literally translates to soup balls or rounds) are a super popular Asian dessert, consisting of small poached mochi balls floating in usually a sweet syrup. They are often eaten during the holidays, and…
Karaage lollipops with mole colorado and yuzu sunomono
When it came to parts of the chicken you would find in an upscale restaurant, I found that almost nobody felt that a chicken wing was fine-dining worthy. So I wanted to tackle that, and try to class up chicken wings a little bit. Mostly because they are delicious, have tons of flavor, and need…
“Lazy mornings”: a plated dish
This dish was inspired by a Hong Kong breakfast classic, being macaroni soup. Macaroni soup consists of a creamy chicken stock, macaroni noodles, and ham. It is a Cantonese breakfast staple, and I found it to be the perfect inspiration for a fun dish! For my take on a macaroni soup, I went with a…
Salt and pepper pork chop with egg noodles
I feel like when it comes to savory cooking, I have a tendency to gravitate towards similar components – a seared protein, some sort of vegetable, some sort of starch, and a sauce. This would be no different to that. In fact, it would be 100% that. I wanted to do a lighter take on…
Roast pork belly with pork fat potatoes and vegetable ragout
This dish was basically as close as I could get to a one-pot wonder – had I not needed the pot of water to boil things in, this would have literally been achievable in one pot. We have roasted pork belly with potatoes that are cooked in pork fat, a ragout with peas, shallots, and…
Tangzhong noodles with miso-sesame dressing and Thai chilies
After I made boba from scratch, I had a bizarre epiphany – if I were to cook flour with water into a gelatinous paste, and use that to make noodles, would they come out super chewy? When you are making boba, you do that process with water and tapioca flour to gelatinize the starch, resulting…
Babka sticky buns with chocolate cake ganache and miso butterscotch
I literally only came up with this recipe because I had a lot of leftover sweet potato paste from making the hiyoko manju. I also had a cake order for a chocolate cake, and whenever I make my layer cakes, I always end up with a decent amount of cake scraps. So with leftover sweet…
Shoyu-koji chicken under a brick
I literally came up with this recipe when I was shopping at my local Japanese market, and found rice koji. For those unfamiliar with the product, koji is a bacteria found on rice or grains that can be mixed with soy beans to create miso. It has a ton of umami, and it can be…
Red bean doughnuts(an-doughnut) with roasted miso sugar
These doughnuts were inspired by an-doughnuts(red bean doughnuts) that I found in my local Japanese grocery store. The doughnuts that I purchased were a cake doughnut base with a chunkier red bean paste(called tsubu-an) in the middle, finished with granulated sugar around it. While I liked the concept of it, I felt like there was…
Calpico Kakigoori(shaved ice)
This is literally the simplest recipe I have put up in a while. Mostly because it was inspired by several aspects of my earlier childhood, better known as a time before I got into cooking(I literally only started to cook/bake when I was 15 onwards). I have a lot of fond memories drinking Calpico water…
Fluffy buttermilk biscuits
I’m not going to lie and claim that I grew up making biscuits with my mother from scratch, or even talk about the first time I remember eating a biscuit, because I would be lying on both counts – we probably used the Pillsbury dough if we ever made them, and I really can’t remember…
Freddy's Harajuku 