Living in a Greek neighborhood, you learn to appreciate octopus as an appetizer. It’s rare to go to a Greek restaurant without ever ordering a grill octopus. It’s expensive but at least, not as expensive as in the city. Astoria is great for that: great food at decent price.
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Day 15 Scallop Grapefruit Avocado Salad
It’s the 3rd week of salad. There was a grapefruit on the table for about 2 weeks now. I didn’t want it to go spoil so I decided to make a very simple salad with one of my favorite seafood, scallop.
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Rainy Ride to Nice
4 January 2013
Cloud and rain clung tightly to Liguria, unloading more rain, as if the Northern Apennines have caught some lifeless prisoners and kept them swirling around the foot of its range like lost souls moaning for a way home but have lost their directions.
We took a cab ride from Genoa mid-morning and made our way through torrential downpour, fog, and humidity. We stopped only once at an Autogrill, which is the highway shops selling food, coffee, and gifts. Its food is much better than ones you would find in America.
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Mee Katang (Khmer Seafood Stir Fry)
When I used to live in Lowell, MA, surrounded by many Khmer food, I used to have my brother order out Mee Katang special from Red Rose. It is like fast food but with vegetables and meat. I was fortunate enough to watch my mom cook it at home that when I left, I was able to mimic much of the ingredients. I’ve only ever found one restaurant that made something similar to this and it was in DC.
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Sweet and Sour Shrimp and Tilapia Soup
A storm was coming. A big one they say. It also happened to be my last day at Bluefly as a senior web designer. The relief was unsurmountable. Of course, I got to leave early to wade out Winter Storm Nemo. Did anyone catch those memes floating around?
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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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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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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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Snow Crab and Asparagus Risotto
I am one of those typical Asians who grew up eating rice all my life. I could not imagine not having rice for an entire week. When I went to Italy for over two weeks, all I had was pasta and meat and I was getting homesick and tired of the food. When I finally got to Venice, I tried the seafood risotto at the famous Antico Dolo. It was like home all over again! Granted, the rice grains were short and al dente and it had that cheesy butter taste, it was still great to have rice again.
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