Vietnamese Peanut Sauce

This is another easy sauce, it's not just for spring roll dipping. I also use it for cold noodles with some shredded cucumbers. Believe or not, it's quite delicious. Here is the Nước Tương Chấm recipe.

Peanut sauce made fresh from my kitchen

Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp cooking oil
• 4 cloves garlic minced
• 5 tbsp hoisin sauce
• 4 tbsp smooth peanut butter
• 1/2 cup water

Directions: 

1. Heat pan on medium heat, then add oil and garlic. 
2. Sauté until lightly browned.
3. Add the rest of the ingredients one by one and mix well.
4. Turn the heat up to medium high and bring to a boil.
5. Once it hits a boil immediately turn off the heat
6. Use a whisk to blend till smooth.
7. Remove from heat and chill, or serve right away.
8. You can add some crushed peanuts on top before serving
9. If you use sugar-free peanut butter, a tbsp of sugar would help sweeten it

Veggie soup with quinoa

Trying to duplicate my love with the soup at Season's Harvest Cafe in Cypress.

The only difference was the price.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup cooked quinoa
1 cup zucchini, sliced
1 cup broccoli
1/4 cup red bell pepper, cubed

Direction:

1. Cook your broth with my Chicken Broth recipe or open a can of beef broth. 
2. Boil the ingredients until zucchini and broccoli are tender.
3. Remove from heat and season with sea salt.
4. Ready to serve.

My version is good as their version.

Twist'n Shout Rolls

Dinner rolls are the essential item at a Thanksgiving dinner. I hate to buy the ones in the grocery store that have been prepared weeks ago. One day, out of nowhere, I thought to make our own rolls by hand. It was a lot of fun. But so much work. The benefit of baking my own bread is that I can control what goes on top and how it shows.

Ingredients:

Proofing:
1 envelope Fleischmann's Active Dry Yeast
1/2 cup warm water
1 tbsp sugar

Dough:
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
2 tbsp butter, softened

Topping:

Egg White, Sesame Seeds, Coarse Sea Salt

Directions:

Proofing & Mixing:

1. Dissolve Active Dry yeast in warm water with sugar in a small bowl. Let stand until the foam doubles the size
2. In a large mixing bowl, add 1 cup flour, sugar, salt, milk and butter. 
3. Beat 2 min at medium speed of electric mixer. 
4. Add proofed yeast liquid and 1 more cup flour gradually; beat on high speed of mixer for 2 min. 
5. Add in additional flour to make a soft dough. 
6. Knead the dough in the bowl to form the correct consistence.

Rising:

1. Place dough in the greased pans, turning once to coat. 
2. Cover and let rise in a warm, draft-free place for 30 minutes or until doubled.
3. Punch dough down and divide dough into 12 equal pieces. 
4. Shape into balls. Place in greased 8-inch round pan. Cover with moist warm towels.
5. Leave the dough on a cooking stove near a heated source. (not touching the dough).
6. Let rise 30 minutes or until doubled for the last time.

French Curl:

1. Prepare 2 equal amount of dough and form the dough into string shape of 8 inch length.
2. On a lightly floured surface, pinch 1 end of both strings together and twist them into a zigzag. Pinch the other end.
3. Brush egg white and sprinkle raw sesame seeds and salt crystals.

Baking:

1. Preheat oven to 375°F. 
2. Bake rolls for 20 to 25 minutes, or until done. 
3. Remove from pan. Serve warm.

Adopted from Fleischmann's Recipe #662

Originally posted December 26, 2013.

Simple Chicken Broth

Chicken was on sale at 59¢ a pound. I bought several. After removing the meat from the bones, I decided to cook these bones for clear chicken broth.

1 set of chicken back and breast cage
2 stalks of celery
3 skinny carrots
half onion
4 cups water

Set to SLOW COOKER mode. It will automatically cook for 8 hours.

This is a base for a lot of soups. You can modify the vegetables as you see fit. Discard the vegetables and season the broth with salt and pepper if necessary.

Just Rice

Nothing fancy. Just trying on steamed rice with half white, half brown in this Midea Electric Pressure Cooker.

Follow the usual rice cooker instructions:
1 cup Jasmine brown rice
1 cup Jasmine rice
3 cups water

Set to BROWN RICE and wait til it's done.

Steamed rice close up.

Comparing to the conventional rice cooker, the texture was perfect on the day of cooking. However, the quality degrade faster to hard to chew on 6th day. I don't like to haul around a large pot just to cook rice. So, my conclusion is to continue using my mini rice cooker. 

Chicken Soup Made of Scraps

It's cold outside. My favorite comfort food is soup. Instead of spending money at the restaurants, I decided to make my own chicken soup. After learning from Ziad at Eatwell Bakery Cafe , I want to try his "nothing but chicken" recipe. Well, I had to clean up my refrigerator last night. I added some other stuff.

I striped this chicken to bones only. I used other parts for entree.

Ingredients:
1 Chicken back and bones from breast part. Don't remove skin. That's for flavoring.
2 Carrots, medium size
1 Celery, stalk
1 Cucumber (I hate to waste a freeze-burnt veggie.)
1/2 Onion
1 piece American Ginseng (optional)
1-3 tbsp Salt, after the soup is done

Procedure:

1. Put everything in the pot and fill with water to cover the ingredients.
2. Set Midea Electrical Pressure Cooker to SOUP setting for 33 minutes.
3. Follow instruction to start the process.
4. When done, release pressure and discard all vegetable solids. 
5. Remove soup and meat from the pot, season with 1 tbsp salt to taste.

Fresh chicken is on sale 58¢ per pound at H-E-B on Beechnut. Time to make some good soup at home and save my money for Houston Rodeo next month.

My Midea Pressure Cooker

This is a review based on my recent purchase of Midea Pressure Cooker. A similar review is also posted on BestBuy.com (4-star review).

My golden pot. No, it's not made of gold.

Before I bought this pressure cooker, I had a quick search online. I didn't see any negative review about it, although there isn't many. The price was so good and I took the chance. I didn't regret buying it because I've been using it twice a day during my first week of "trial".

I have tried every setting on this pressure cooker. My favorite is the Soup setting. The pressure builds up and the time starts to ticking. There is an internal weight measuring device to know how long it will need to cook. This 10-cup capacity for rice cooking is huge. So, I don't plan to replace my current 4-cup rice cooker. The rice came out really airy but needs to be consumed within a day. The rice quality degrades after being refrigerated after 2 days.

Below is my breakdown on each setting:

• Brown Rice - 18 minutes to start with 3 cups of rice
• Steam - default at 30 minutes, can be set at 1 to 60 minutes
• Soup - 20 to 45 minutes
• Slow Cook - 8 hours and can't adjust. Not sure if it's defective
• Beans - 30 to 60 minutes

After my first week of trial, I began to find Midea products online. It's a popular brand for kitchen appliances in Hong Kong. I also read the blog about their pressure cookers as well as learned some history and tricks in cooking certain type of food.

My only pet peeve was the instructional manual being highly inefficient and translated badly. There isn't any real recipe on there, only how to get started. I was overwhelmed with warning phrases. Yes. It's really dangerous if you don't obey. But it's far safer than the stove top pressure cooker. I'd rather unplug the cooker to release the pressure than using the lever.

Here are some of my recipes - http://loucancook.blogspot.com/search/label/Midea%20Pressure%20Cooker

Low GI Cookies

This is a recipe for healthy and delicious oatmeal raisin cookies with lots of fibers and very low sugar. Great for people watching their A1C and stay on the low Glycemic Index (GI).

The energy you get will be burned from chewing them. 

Ingredients:

7 tbsp soften butter
1 tbsp molasses
5/8 cup Splenda
1 egg
1/2 tsp Vanilla
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 1/2 cup Quaker oats
1/4 cup raisins
1/4 cup dried fruits (chopped dates, apricots, etc)

Directions:

1. Cream butter & Splenda in mixing bowl
2. Mix wet ingredients (molasses, egg, vanilla) into bowl
3. Mix dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, cinnamon) into bowl
4. Turn in oats, raisins & dried fruits into bowl
5. Form dough in 1 tbsp measuring spoon
6. Bake at 375° 10-12 min or until golden brown
7. Cool 5 minutes on cookie sheet, remove to cooling plate, after cooling, place in plastic container to store.

Yields 28 cookies @ 3 gram carbs & 6 gram fiber per cookie
Originally posted on Facebook 6/19/10