I went a little crazy at the food market today. One should never to go to the grocery on an empty stomach because you leave with an empty wallet. Craving everything, I bought quails despite the cost. They used to be cheaper and more came in a package. This time, only 4 was in the package. I felt a little cheated since the meat are so little. Nonetheless, I do love the taste, especially cooked right, so I had a craving for them.
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Wild Berry Custard
Custard is one of those things I use for cakes, cream puffs, and all sorts of sweet dippings. It’s definitely one of my favorite but I rarely ever make it. Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of CreateTV shows and one of my favorites have been Fast Cooking with Jacques Pepin. One of his dessert was a berry custard which sounded so easy to make. The original recipe is found here.
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Baked Lentil Samosas
When I was on a vegetarian diet for a week, I went around looking for good food that wasn’t just vegetables. Then I found Curry-in-a-Hurry in Manhattan’s Indian district known as Murray Hill, better known as Curry Hill by the locals.
There I found these cheap $1 samosas filled with potatoes, beef, and chicken. The potato samosas turned out to be my favorite and they were filling. However, the downfall of them was how oily they were.
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Cooking Class: Polynesian Dishes
One day, Groupon offered a cooking class deal and my coworkers and I decided to jump on it and take the opportunity to spend the night out. Of course, when we booked the class, I didn’t know that it would on my second to last day at work.
So as part of celebrating my good-bye before the imminent blizzard, we caught some drinks and appetizer by the Meatpacking District. Of course, we didn’t realize how shi-shi that area is and the first few bars we passed, we got rejected! Not really, it was just they had private menus. Eventually, we settled at Sea Thai across from the beer garden of the Standard hotel.
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Lobster Primavera Risotto
Making risotto takes practice. Lots of practice and trial and error. There’s so many versions of it that I can make but I always stick to the seafood risotto. This time, I wanted to include more vegetables and change up the broth.
I was watching CreateTV and Martha Stewart was doing a cooking class on how to make various types of rice. Risotto was one of the last things she taught, showing the difficulty it was to learn to make it. I took some of those skills she taught to make this version for Sunday dinner.
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Chorizo Pepper Salad
Finally, I made it through the chorizo! While making the lobster chorizo stir fry, I had several leftover ingredients. With those ingredients, I made a batch of chorizo pepper salad for lunch and dinner the next day.
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Lobster Chorizo Stir Fry
For the past week, New York City seems to have been encased in an ice box. With Friday’s light snow gripping the frozen cement, the weekend was an excuse to stay in bed and keep warm. However, that wasn’t to be so. Sunday morning was the New York Half Marathon and since my boyfriend decided that he would run, I moseyed out of Queens to support him at the end of the race.
The city is ghostly cold with one or two people walking and a handful of cabs running up and down Upper East Side. Where the race ends, I walked through the fashionable streets where Tom Ford, Asprey, Gucci, and Ralph Lauren resided.
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Lamb Chorizo Dirty Rice Mix
This past weekend, which was absolutely beautiful compared this week which has been below freezing (I’m thankful there has been no snow, which would have made the work week miserable), my roommate and I were planning to go to a knitting store down by Union Square. When we got out the train, the smell of fresh seafood and hustle and bustle of the Greenmarket lured us in. We walked around, tasted bites, and envied those people who were buying loads of apple donuts.
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Baked Pine-nut Encrusted Tilapia
After attending cooking class at Rustico where I learned how to make pine nut crusted branzino, I really wanted to create more dishes with that technique. I don’t have branzino but I always have a stash of tilapia around so I decided to make a simple dinner with those pine nuts thought in mind.
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Cooking Class: Italian Riviera
After visiting Italy (mostly the north), I was very excited to find a class that offered focaccia making as part of the recipe. And the most exciting thing was that the class was next door to my work. Rustico Cooking is a small cooking class but over 30 people showed up for the class.
Upon arriving, they gave us tastings of gruyere crostini and frittata. Very yummy. There were 2 long tables to prepare us for the upcoming dinner.
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