This recipe in a lot of ways is my play on a charcuterie board, but featuring onigiri. I wanted to make three different kinds of rice balls, featuring pork belly, salmon, and mushrooms, two sauces, one that was creamy and garlicky and another that is sweet-sour-smoky, and some Japanese-style pickles to garnish with. When I…
Tag: Tomato
Turkish Simit
I first heard about simit years ago when I was binging The Chef’s Line on Netflix. The show is a cooking competition between home cooks and the team from a restaurant, and each week centers around a different restaurant and their style of cuisine. There was a Turkish week where I just learned a lot…
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…
Tofu gnocchi with mala-spiced arrabiata ragout
I would be 100% lying if I said that this dish was not hideous to look at. I feel with pasta dishes, they are either super gorgeous, or super rustic(my way of saying that the components are just piled on top of each other because they have no other way to go on the plate)….
Chicken cacciatore with egg noodles
This was literally a simple dinner that I whipped together after I butchered a chicken and had to figure out how I was going to cook the thighs. I love chicken cacciatore, the latter word in the term being the Italian word for “hunter”, because it is this super hearty dish. Think of chicken stewed…
Air fried poutine with spicy beef gravy
This is honestly the ugliest thing I have ever made. But that’s what poutine is: fries with gravy and cheese curds. What sets this poutine apart from most is that I went with using my air fryer on to potatoes – this does not make them fully guilt-free, but it does alleviate some of that…
Cabbage rolls with bread sauce and roasted cabbage chips
I have made many a cabbage roll back in college. Mostly because green cabbage is 99 cents, and ground meat was really cheap as well. If there was anything I learned during my time at Boston University, it was how to pinch pennies. With my variation on cabbage rolls, I love using panade(a mixture of…
Squash blossom and ricotta pizza
This pizza is my love letter to Pizzeria Mozza in West Hollywood. Namely because I love that restaurant, but driving all the way over there from the South Bay area in Southern California is a giant pain. They have this wonderful pizza with Nancy Silverton’s perfected O.G. La Brea Bakery bread that has a blanket…
Something comforting: a plated dish
I really love stewed chickpeas. Actually I just love chickpeas in general. And luckily, I got to cook with them more often these days because I need them for their aquafaba. However, with all of the vegan meringue I have been making, I still need to get rid of the actual chickpeas themselves. So this…
“番茄炒蛋”: a plated dish
番茄炒蛋, or tomato-fried eggs, are a childhood staple for me, and probably every Chinese/Taiwanese person. Simply put, it’s scrambled eggs with tomato, topped with scallions and/or cilantro. A very humble dish, and because of that, a great blank canvas/ inspiration for a prettier, more complex one. My mom’s version included ginger, since it provided a…
Moussaka pizza
One of my favorite dishes from Greece is moussaka. It’s basically layers of ground meat, typically lamb, sometimes beef, stewed in this tomato sauce with eggplant, potatoes, and a creamy béchamel on top of that is broiled until golden brown. With the exception of the potato, honestly, all of those things could be incorporated into…
Quick cassoulet with black pepper cornbread madeleine
In light of the quarantine pandemics surrounding the coronavirus, my plating bestie Bri and I thought it would be a lot of fun, very interesting, and perfectly fitting if we could take canned foods and transform them into gourmet or fine dining dishes. The challenge was to see what we could make in an hour…
One pot cheeseburger dumplings
When I saw that there was going to be a one pot challenge on MasterChef, the FIRST three things that came to mind were Japanese cream stew, the dreaded tarte tatin that I royally messed up, and the one that I would have gone for, knowing that the recipe would be in a family magazine,…
Butter chicken potstickers
In continuation with my dumpling project(where I take dishes and translate them into little parcels of love and joy), I wanted to try merging butter chicken with potstickers, just because I felt like the two could have a lot of potential to really compliment one another. So we have the chicken thighs that are marinated…
Tomato-basil flatbreads
I love making pizzas or flatbreads. Kneading the dough is definitely one of my favorite parts in making bread dough, just because it takes a lot of effort, love, and attention. Plus, it’s a great arm workout, so there’s that too. For my dough, I kept it really simple and went with my very straightforward…
Munti with tomato broth
I was inspired to make these last summer from a couple different things. Lamb munti, a Turkish dumpling, I learned how to make these from reading Prune by Gabrielle Hamilton. For the broth, I was inspired by a restaurant in Cerritos, California, called Omar’s Halal Chinese, where they do these hand pulled noodles with a smoky…
Freddy's Harajuku 