Lately, I’ve been getting into cooking — lots and lots of cooking. Before I was married and had school or worked, I called myself a baker and not a cook. Jeh was the cook, between the two of us. I only liked to bake sweet things and sucked at cooking anything else. Even then I hardly baked. Though I preferred it over regular cooking, it was rare if I baked and I really didn’t try out many things. Well, times have changes and I never thought I would be cooking dishes as I do now. I’ve always wanted to be a cook, but never had the motivation to do it. I’d.. || Continue Reading →

Here are a couple more free apps that I’ve tried out and still have: Evernote: (by Evernote Corp.) Great app! I’ve been using the Evernote web service since August ‘09 and have over 260 notes. I use it as my online recipe manager, as well as adding ideas and planning parties. This app came out last December and made my life much easier since. I love being able to access any recipe with ease while away from my computer (like if I’m at a grocery store and forgot to write all ingredients down or if I had to recall a recipe for whatever reason). The app itself.. || Continue Reading →

Yesterday we hosted a Super Bowl party and prepared most of the food. Cori graciously helped and made a delicious mac and cheese casserole and 2 racks of BBQ ribs. I made Yoshida sauce (teriyaki) chicken wings and cooked Kalua pork in our crock pot. We had flour and corn tortillas for anyone that wanted to eat it as a pork taco, and King’s Hawaiian sweet rolls for anyone that wanted to eat it as a pork slider. We served it with all the fixings: sour cream, guacamole, cole slaw (bought the “cole slaw kit” in the produce section and I love it!), mango salsa (from.. || Continue Reading →

I had stumbled upon this site earlier this year: http://www.tastespotting.com/. It is a really cool site that draws you in purely through amazing food photography. I have found many of my recipes through this site. At times I found really great recipes straight through this site and other times I’m inspired by the photos and remember a recipe that I always forget to look up. It has all sorts of food photography and can definitely spark up an appetite. I used this site for all of the parties I hosted this year (which is a lot), to help me find new dishes or give me ideas.. || Continue Reading →

This holiday season inspired me to bake….a lot! (Photography by Cori Dang) For our Christmas dinner, I wanted to try making Melting Moments. It’s somewhat similar to Mexican Wedding Cakes/Cookies, except without the nuts and almond flavoring. These melting moments have a very buttery taste (much like shortbread) and melt in your mouth. It melts in your mouth even more if it’s warm. The following day seemed to not be as melty-in-your-mouth, but it was still good and crumbles in your mouth. It’s a very delicate cookie and tastes really good! Recipe is from.. || Continue Reading →

For my uncle’s book launch party (A Kung-Fu Master’s Journey) I helped out and made some snacks for the party. Since I had a 7 lb. bag of chocolate chips from Costco, I sort of had to make chocolate chip cookies. I made about 180 cookies using 3 different recipes that I’ve been wanted to try out: Alton Brown’s “The Chewy”, New York Time’s, and Sweet Melissa Sunday (SMS). (Photography by Cori Dang) For New York Time’s Chocolate Chip Cookies, I replaced the cake flour and bread flour with 3 3/4 cups All-purpose flour. This one tasted.. || Continue Reading →

As I was watching “Toy Story” with my nephew today, I noticed the gas station that Buzz and Woody hopped into the Pizza Planet truck was named “Dinoco”. And also remembered the company in the movie “Cars” was named “Dinoco”. I know I’ve caught more of these Pixar in-jokes in other Pixar movies and short films, but I wanted to find somewhere that listed them all. I searched the web and came across Jim Hill’s answer on his forum. Although it doesn’t contain ALL of Pixar’s in-jokes, it shows a good amount of.. || Continue Reading →

My current obsession: mini cheesecakes. My family and I had dinner at Seastar Restaurant in Bellevue earlier this month and I tried their Pineapple Upside-Down Cheesecake. It was amazing! I’m usually not a huge cheesecake fan, but this dish was just perfect. Personal sized, new york style cheesecake on top of a macadamia nut crust and topped with a pineapple slice and caramel-pecan sauce. Perfect. I sought out online for a similar recipe, but couldn’t find one. I found recipes that sounded good and mixed and matched to try to fit what I remembered eating. Along.. || Continue Reading →

I randomly ran into this site and has possibly the cutest items I’ve ever seen. For me to love every single item on one single site/store is something that doesn’t come very often for me. They claim all their products are hand-made and are high quality. From the looks of the pictures, they do look like pretty good quality. The site is pretty bare (inventory wise), although it looks like they made some pretty good sales at a recent event at their booth. With every product being hand-made, I can understand why it might take some time to restock. I’ll be checking.. || Continue Reading →

Here are a few more free apps that I’ve tried out and still have: Toggle Settings (Donut): (by cooolmagic) This the version for the Donut update. This is similar to the other app, Useful Switchers. You can switch between various preset phone settings. But the difference here is that you can customize it a bit, unlike Useful Switchers (Useful Switchers was changed to a paid app, so I uninstalled it). There are two (or more, if you prefer) tabs, and you can move certain settings to a different tab, allowing you to have the frequently used settings on top for easy access.. || Continue Reading →