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…

Wintermelon Mooncakes

These wintermelon mooncakes are my homage to wintermelon tea. Wintermelon is not a super popular ingredient outside of Asia, as it is a relatively bland gourd that is caramelized and used as an ingredient for boba milk tea frequently. I grew up drinking wintermelon tea all the time, so I wanted to use that as…

Palm Sugar Iced Mugicha(Barley Tea)

Growing up, one of my favorite beverages was iced barley tea. It would be lightly sweetened, and it was a very refreshing beverage, especially during the winter. I happened to purchase a large amount of mugicha(barley tea) bags from my local Japanese grocery store a while ago, and while I love having mugicha around to…

Lu Rou Fan Rice Bowls

Lu rou fan, or 滷肉饭 as it’s written in Chinese, is a Chinese/Taiwanese dish that consists of braised meat, usually pork, with rice, and it’s usually served with pickled daikon and an egg that is usually braised or cooked with the stew. At least that’s how I was raised to eat it. The stew is…

Chrysanthemum Douhua

One of my earliest food memories was going to dim sum with my parents on Sundays. We would be served chrysanthemum tea with everything we ate and we would usually finish off a meal of spareribs, sticky rice, and dumplings and fried radish cakes with egg tarts and a sweet tofu called douhua. Douhua, which…

Dadar gulung mille crepe(pandan and coconut)

So a lot of Asians grew up on pandan, but truthfully, I never did. I always hear people saying that it’s the “vanilla of Asia”, which I might call blatant B.S. to, because I did not grow up on anything with pandan at all. And before the pandemic, I never even had anything with pandan…

Gluten-free palm sugar and kinako shortbreads

These were literally just a fun experiment for me. Since we are in the holiday season, cookies are a must and a definite. I love doing different kinds of cookies and shortbreads, so I wanted to make some that, in this case, featured kinako. For those of you who are not familiar with it, kinako…