Thanksgiving Dinner

Each Thanksgiving and also for Christmas dinner, my siblings and I go to my parent's house.  My mom usually makes the Turkey or a Ham as main entree, and my bro, sis and I make all the sides, appetizers, and dessert.  


My contribution to the Thanksgiving dinner this year was appetizers of Chicken and Tofu skewers with Miso glaze, Mashed Potatoes, Pecan/Cranberry Pie, and Thanksgiving Green Velvet cake (more on this later), and some roasted garlic for the rolls.


Chicken and Tofu Skewers with Lemon Miso Glaze
I usually make a brie, mushroom, puff pastry baked appetizer, and a spinach dip, but this year since my sister was vegan and I had some frozen chicken to use up, I made these for appetizers.  People always love eating meat on a stick so you can't go wrong. Plus our friends Mike and Bia joined us for dinner this year and Mike loves anything lemon so this was good.

Mashed Potatoes
I didn't take a picture of this but it was sooo good when I first made it. I added buttermilk and cream cheese to freshly boiled mashed potatoes, along with a stick of butter and salt.


Roasted Garlic
This is so good on hot rolls out of the oven, spread on top of butter.  Just tossed some peeled garlic cloves drizzled with olive oil and salt, then bake in oven until golden.

Pecan Cranberry Pie
I make this dessert each year because I LOVE this pie.  I add 1 cup of fresh cranberries because the tartness really cuts the richness of the sweet heavy pie.  I also love the jewel colors of cranberries which always brings a festive mood.  I also added some orange zest and orange extract because I love the orange and cranberry combo.

3 Eggs
1 cup of corn syrup
1/2 cup of dark brown sugar
1/2 cup of sugar
3 tbs of butter melted
1/2 tsp of vanilla
2 tsp of orange extract or fresh squeezed juice
2 cups of pecan halves
1 cup of fresh cranberries
Zest of 1 orange
1 Unbaked of your favorite pie crust or use store bought


There is really no dry mix here, all contribute to wet mix.  
Mix eggs, corn syrup, both sugars, butter, vanilla, and orange extract.  
Stir in pecans, then cranberries, and then orange zest.

Roll out your pie crust into a pie pan and shape your edges.  
Pour the wet mixture into the pie crust.
Cover the pie edge with foil so your outer crust don't over bake.
Put into a oven and bake for 40 min.  
Remove the foil and bake for 10 more min.
Cool for 1 hour.  Serve with ice cream or whipped cream.


Thanksgiving Green Velvet Cake
I made a second dessert of a cake.  It was green because I ran out of red food coloring.  A good friend of mine drove 50 miles to get me the Urth Cafe's Hazelnut Chocolate cake last weekend while she is on a trip to LA.  I wanted to give her something nice so I made a Red Velvet Cake for her Thanksgiving dessert.  I wanted to make an extra cake but only had yellow, blue, and green food colors left so I made a green one.  It's not that pretty but fun.

Our family dinner has some traditions that won't change such as the pecan pie.  We also always have what we call the white trash jello salad mixed with Cool whip, we also always have 2 kinds of stuffing, the traditional bread kind, but also my mom makes a rice stuffing that fills up the turkey and is baked.  Soung is vegan so she made a green salad and some risotto rice cakes.    All were green so my cake fitted right in.  :)


Thanksgiving dinner is so much easier when you split up the dishes.  Focusing on a few dishes for the day is easy on the clean up and you don't cook all day. 


Hope you all had a great celebration and eating!

Cranberry Lemon Tart

Last week, my good friend Kim invited me to a fabulous dinner at her house.  I said I would bring dessert and asked her what can I bring?  She said her family loves a good deep dish cherry pie.  I was gung ho about this because I've not yet made a cherry pie before. Well, cherries are out of season and I couldn't even find frozen cherries thus I had to get creative.  I wanted to deliver a dessert that gave similar flavors and visuals.  


So I came up with a lemon tart that would give the similar tartness of a cherry pie with a good sweet sugary shell.  I topped it with a cranberry compote to mimic the bright red cherries.

The idea was good but my execution of it was so-so.  For my lemon tarts, I like a sweet sable cookie like crust but I wanted to balance a little nuttiness so added some chopped pecan to the dough. I usually don't put egg in my sweet pastry shells but this time, I thought the pecans could use something to help bind so added 1 egg.  I think this was my downfall.  The end product crust was too hard.  It didn't crumble but had to press hard to break it.  I think I over baked it a bit too.

The cranberry compote was also too thin and runny and didn't set properly so it ran down the tart and the lemon curd showed up though.  I needed to use more corn starch or use gelatin next time.

This was a tried dessert.  I promised to document all my good and bad...so this is a lesson learn.  Will repost when I get it right.


The good thing is that Kim and her family loved the dessert and gave great compliments but I need to perfect the recipe and redo to the way it should have been.


Kim made a fabulous dinner of halibut with a nice pecan crust, roasted pepper & potato side, grilled asparagus, nice fall salad with more pecans and pears.  Yummy it was.


Now off to start my Thanksgiving cooking...stay tuned.

Serendipity 3

The home of the "Frozen Hot Chocolate".  The famous sugary place that has been in countless movies set in NYC like Serendipity and One Fine Day.  It's a legendary place that has been around since 1954.

The frozen hot chocolate is like a chocolate slurpee with lots of whipped cream and chocolate shaving.  I thought it was going to be a cold/hot dessert with real warm hot chocolate over ice cream.  It was nothing like that. It was good and actually nice that the actual shake like concoction was an icy slurpee because it made it less rich.


So silly!  Soung and I are truely on a NYC food tour or else we would not have anything like this normally.  Well...I would.  :)  But we could not finish. Hate wasting food.

Doughnut Plant

For those that know me...you know how I love my doughnuts.  I've found the best doughnut in the world.  This one didn't disappoint!  It met all my expectations and more.  It's the Doughnut Plant's creations.  I just love it when someone specializes in something and makes it so well to perfection.   I will truely miss this one.  And yes Mike!  This is so much better than Krispy Kreme! 


Coconut Cream
Really filled with coconut cream not some sugary stuff.  It's like the coconut cream that tops black rice sticky pudding.  Yummy!

Apple Cinnamon
This was great fresh apple flavor. They use real fruit and not flavoring. See the apple pieces.

Peanut Butter and Blackberry Jam
They make their own jam to fill these.

Doughnut Plant
379 Grand Street
NY, NY 10002
http://www.doughnutplant.com/

Bouchon Bakery

Yum! Yum! Yum!

My other chef idol is Thomas Keller.  He has a bakery called Bouchon Bakery.  This is his spin from Bouchon bistro which is supposed to be like a bistro in Paris.  I'm assuming the bakery is also the same.


The bakery in NYC is located in the Time Warner Building which is like the Bravern in Seattle. An upscale mall with business offices.  This one had a Whole Food on the bottom floor, 3 floors of shopping.  One of the biggest William and Sonomas I've seen that even had furniture.  This building also housed his Per Se restaurant which is 275 per person for the pre fixed meal.


Anyway, I found this place very lovely and very inspired when I open my own place some day.  One thing about Thomas Keller is that everything is so prestine.  Lovely and perfect.  It feels like Martha Stewart like but even crisper and with a touch of white gloves.   They also had sit down lunch, as well as a walk up counter of cafe.  The food looked amazing!

Chocolate Eclair

Doughnut
This is a nice beneigh topped with chocolate covered somekind of krispies.  Each of these little balls are like rice crispies.

Chocolate Tart

Bouchon Bakery NYC

Ten Columbus Circle

Third Floor

New York, NY 10019

WD-50

Tonight was suppose to be the dinner at the creme de la creme...WD-50.  Wylie Dufresne restaurant in NYC.

50 Clinton Street

New York, NY 10002

http://www.wd-50.com/info.html

I have been waiting and eager to try this place for sometime.   I am a huge fan of Wylie Dufresne, for his passion, technique, vision, and his love-play for food. 


Well...I don't know.  The food didn't blow me or Soung away.  It was good, fun, and an experience, but I think I was expecting too much.  It seems this way with these uber chef's places.  David Chang's place was a disappoint and this wasn't but, i don't think I need to go back.


Soung and I both forgot our cameras, and both our phones were weak on batteries to take pics.  This is what happens when you book a 10pm dinner and take a little nap break before hand.  Luckily, his website has some pics of the dinner and discriptions so I pulled the pics that I could from his site here.  Here is what we had.


For starters...
Eggs Benedict
This is what Soung had.  It was a deconstructed.  The play is that the egg yolks are a solid.  The cream sauce was encapsuled into the breaded cubes.  Soung had the florentine version since she didn't eat ham.  It was a spinach chip.  She said it tasted best when she ate it with all the components in one bite.  It tasted like the breakfast food.  It was important for her to try this because she heard Wylie's favorite food was breakfast and this is what he would eat as his last meal.

Cheese and Broccoli Soup with Pickled Onions  
This was just a bowl of cream soup, with small blanched broccoli pieces, pickled read onion, and a cheese twill. 




Main...
Parsnip Tart
Soung had this and it had some smoked quinoa, hazelnuts, steamed bok choy, on a parnip pureed glee, fried parsnip chips, and flat cracker.  Again, all deconstructed.  Tasted a bit bland and the fried parsnip felt like it had been sitting around for a bit.


Arctic Char with Snow Pea, Fried Yucca, Cherry-Black Bean Sauce
This is what I had and it was pretty good.  Fish cooked perfectly and the sauce was very savory and flavorful.  I didn't care for the fried skin,  Again, felt it was fried a head of time and sat too long.  The fried yucca tasted a lot like tater tots.  Not kidding.

Dessert...
Hazelnut Tart with Coconut, Chocolate, Chicory
This was by far my favorite.  It was actually a coconut cream tart with a layer of nutella chocolate layer.  The hazelnut was nicely toasted and salted, but I could do without the foam.  I don't one person who likes the foam unless it's on a latte or cappuchino, not on dinner.  It didn't add anything to the dessert. 

All in all, not bad but not tremendous.  What I did like was that the chef was there in the kitchen being the executive and checking each plate before it left the kitchen.  If I didn't forget my camera, I would have prob asked to take a picture with him. I have no shame.  I still love him and admire him very much.

Candle 79

Candle 79 is a vegan restaurant on Soung's list of places to check out.  Being the nice sister that I am, I of course go with her to try.  Well don't tell her but it was not good and too pricy.  The worst 32.00 I've spent.  Not going to say anything more.  Vegan is enough.  Food is pretty but ugh yuk for me.  

154 East 79th Street

New York, NY 10021

STEAMED DUMPLINGS - seitan, shiitake mushrooms,baby bok choy, sesame-ginger-soy sauce

I asked them what they are known for. They said this was their signature dish.
SEITAN PICCATA - creamed spinach, grilled potato cake,oyster mushrooms, lemon-caper sauce

Soung had this.
CARIBBEAN JERK GRILLED TEMPEH - plantains, collard greens, black bean sauce, coconut-green papaya salsa, habañero-cilantro coulis

Momofuku Noodle Bar and Milk Bar

Last night, we had dinner at the Momofuku Noodle Bar and grabbed some desserts from the Milkbar.

I've been waiting since 2007 to try this place.  I've been dying to try the Crack Pie that Anderson Cooper has been raving about.


Well....


Expectations set too high?  I don't know...was good but not great and did not meet the expectations. 


Some things were good, but maybe it's because I am Korean and know the authentic Korean flavors and know my mom's food's flavors.  It wasn't so exotic for me and the flavors were not new.  I don't know but... David, you didn't meet the hype.  Definititly not in the baked goods department which is my love.  






Noodle Bar


They had more vegetarian dishes than I had anticipated. 


Steamed Buns
We had the veggie version with the shitake mushrooms.  The pork version is the one he made famous.  The mushrooms were too salty. There was some cool sweet pickled cucumbers but not sweet enough.


Beet Salad with Cream
This was a hit. It was roasted beets with blood orange, nori nibs, some buttermilk cream sauce.  This was good and beautifully food.  Or as Lucas said...fancy food.

Roasted Cauliflower
This was mediocure at the best for me. Soung seem to like.  Had brown butter, some raisins and pine nuts.


Jar of Kim Chee
This was surprisingly good but didn't have enough cabbage.  It was full of the chili pepper case. I like the jar it came in. 

Ginger Noodle
This is what Soung and I had.  It was more like a noodle salad.  Had some same shitake mushrooms in the steam buns, some greens, seaweed, ginger, and some oil.  Too salty and not that great.  The noodle texture was good though.

Momofuku Noodle
This is the classic pork ramen  with eggs and seaweed.  Lucus and Heather had this and seemed to like it.  I wish they had some veggie version of this.  I wanted a warm bowl of soup like this.  

The wait for the Noodle Bar was about an hour so we decided to hike over to the Milk Bar first and get some sweets.  Here we are after getting our goodies, sitting outside of Milk Bar and just eating desserts before our dinner.  My way of eating!  :)

Milk Bar
I'm not kidding when I said that Anderson Cooper loves this Crack Pie.  He was guest hosting Regis and Kelly and was talking non stop about this.  So, I was expecting something really salty, creamy, but really, it was some condensed milk thin cold pie.   We also got the Compost Cookie which was suppose to be like a cookie with everything but the kitchen sink but it wasn't.  Just some simple choc chip like cookie, very thin.  Not impressive.  We also got this Birthday Cake Truffles, which was good but flat on flavor.  Perhaps I'm being tough but I just expected a lot, prob too much.    The best thing was probaby the Apple Pie Cake that Lucus got but I didn't get to try. 


Crack Pie

Apple Pie Cake

Momfuku has some great concepts and I wanted to love the food but it wasn't.  The place has some good environment but food was flat for me.  Perhaps this is because I'm veggie and you need to have the meat dishes.   I am a dessert lover so did expect to love Milk Bar but it wasn't for me.    I got some great insprirations. 


I do love that he uses many organic ingredients and most are local.  He lists where he sources his vendors as well.


I'm going to make my own version of "crack" pie.  A pie that is so addictive but will be nothing like this gooie buttery stuff.  Mine will have salt, chocolate, and much more!

NYC Food Tour

It's been so long since my last post and it's due to my busy day job.  But....I am in NYC for next 11 days and food tour here we come!   I have a long list of places to check out, more places than the days will allow us to eat.  I will capture it all!  

Palma NYC

We are arrived in NYC late last night!   For our first meal, we decided to eat a late dinner at below the apartment we are renting from.  The place is called Palma. It's an organic, rustic, family italian restaurant.  The food was AMAZING!  The atmosphere was so rustic, neighborhood, and urban living that I love!!!!  We need more places like this in Seattle.  Check out our foods...

28 Cornelia Street
New York, NY 10014
http://www.palmanyc.com/


Bread and Eggplant Caponata

They started us off with some homemade flat bread and some stewed eggplant and peppers. 

Carciofi Croccanti

Crispy deep fried artichokes with parmigiano and parsley

These were amazing!

Fettuccine ai Funghi

Homemade fettuccine pasta with mixed mushrooms and truffle pate

So much truffle flavors...

Agonolotti di Spinaci

Homemade pasta filled with spinach and buffalo ricotta  in tomatoe sauce, parmigiano, and basil.

You can always tell a great italian by their tomatoe sauce.  It's one of the simpliest and basic item but hard to master.  This was no exception.  I think the organic ingredients really make a difference in flavor.


Simple Tirimisu

The place was so cute and rustic. Love the light fixture.  The funny thing is that since we are renting the apartment above, its decorated very similiar and felt like an extention of our NYC place.  The people were all speaking Italian too.  Just a lovely neighborhood spot with great food.  Just my kind of place!