Grilled Pork Loin with Apple Nuoc Cham

This dish came about after I realized I still had 2 whole heads of romaine lettuce, and I was sick of eating a chopped salad. When it comes to lettuce, I had some semi-traumatic experiences as a child since my mom would serve us boiled lettuce. What you don’t think about when it comes to…

Pork Loin with Fennel, Green Apple, and Potato

This is like the most quintessential meat and three veg-type of dish I am putting on my blog. Mostly because it is homey and comforting, but I wanted to plate it in a more elegant and whimsical way. I wanted to do another pork loin dish, but in terms of what I wanted to pair…

Momotaro Tomato and Bacon Pasta

I love Momotaro tomatoes. They are this pinkish-red Japanese tomato that has a mild sweetness to them. While eating them fresh is usually the way to go, I wanted to try cooking them, and I definitely was not disappointed in the end product: I made a tomato sauce with some of the Momotaro tomatoes, and…

“Feathered Apple”: a plated dessert

I created this dessert from just several techniques that I fell in love with, and wanting to compose those techniques into a cohesive dessert. Homemade phyllo is always something I love to do, while the usage of Almond Inspiration was just to add a pleasant nuttiness. I wanted to use hojicha as well, since it…

Ricotta gnocchi with squash, fennel, and salsa verde

So this dish was actually inspired from when I was watching The Chef’s Line on Netflix. For those unfamiliar with the program, it’s a cooking competition show that was originally in Australia, before it premiered on Netflix as well. Sadly the show is no longer running, but there were a lot of cool recipes and…

Tea-smoked duck with green apple and onion

I came up with this dish because I was thinking about what the prettiest duck dish I could make, and this is what I thought up of. I love to tea smoke proteins, and I love tea smoked duck. Smoking the duck in chamomile tea specifically gives it a pleasant earthiness, and I wanted to…

Prince of the Growing Land: A plated dessert

This would be the third of my three princes who would have led me to my MasterChef Crown, had I been in the finale(cue sad violin music I guess?). Continuing with the sea, sky, and earth motif, this would be my earth-inspired dish and dessert! It is a buckwheat financier with brown butter bavarian cream,…

Pork belly, apple, and cauliflower bowl

I really just came up with this dish after reading through the “Everything I want to eat” cookbook by Sqirl LA’s Jessica Koslow. In the book, there was this delicious pork belly bowl, and I wanted to make my own version of it. They paired the housemade bacon with a sorrel pesto, farro, ricotta cheese,…

Matcha jade layer cake

The idea of this dessert came from wanting to create a layer cake that was visually reminiscent of a garden. I wound up with a dessert that had the gradient of a jade stone, which is still not bad, so pleasant surprises, you know? When it comes to using matcha, getting it to the right…