use real butter

Recipe: stir-fried mi fun

Congratulations to the winners of the Menu for Hope bid items from Boulder! All of the raffle winners are listed on Chez Pim and I’m happy to announce the winners of the local prizes I hosted on use real butter:

UW23 an original photograph by Jen Yu (that’s me) goes to Lee Knapp!
UW24 a $100 gift certificate to the Culinary School of the Rockies goes to Laura Vanderschaaf!
UW25 a $100 gift card to SALT goes to Susan Tamaki!

The winners should contact me with their email addresses so I can get you your prizes. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this annual fundraising effort which raised over $78,000 for the UN World Food Program. As always, a huge thanks to the regional hosts and a huge thanks to Pim for everything.

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We haven’t had much snow this winter, which is not atypical for an El Niño year in the Rockies. Many of my ski pals are getting antsy in the pantsy for some fluffy, white powder because we’re at the end of January. While I might bemoan the paltry number of epic ski days this year (um, NONE so far), it really hasn’t cramped my style. I always shake my head at people who complain that they are bored. I don’t even know how to achieve that. I cram as much as I can into every day because every day is a gift… aaaaand because I’m hyper. Oddly, when Work gets busy, Play seems to get just as busy. I like busy. We’ve been having plenty of fun.

fun at the movies

fun on the slopes

fun at the sushi bar

fun with fellow food bloggers

And don’t forget the mi fun. What is mi fun? It’s Chinese for rice noodle vermicelli. Or would that be rice vermicelli? It is yet another Asian noodle I grew up eating and loving. I’ve never found them fresh, only dried in the Asian grocery stores. I usually have at least a package or two of the dried, delicate noodles in my pantry.

here’s what they look like right out of the package

after soaking in lukewarm water

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Recipe: tomato garlic pasta sauce

My old office was directly across the hall from the Los Angeles Times Press Room in the Seismology building at Caltech. Every time there was a local earthquake in California or a sizable earthquake around the globe, the press would flock to this room where Dr. Kate Hutton would calmly answer questions. During my years at Cornell, graduate students got word of seismic events and went down to the seismograph on the first floor of our building to see the three paper records tracing out first motions. The seismology group would be analyzing the digital records, but the rest of us watched the drums roll as the wave signatures slowly came into view. Sometimes a rupture was merely scientifically significant – occurring out in the middle of “nowhere”. Or it was a scare near population centers where there was thankfully no loss of life… And other times, like this past week, it was catastrophic.

I remember talking on the phone with the lead investigator on the Sumatran plate boundary research project right after the Banda Aceh earthquake and Tsunami in 2004. As he gave me a list of maps and images he needed from our group in preparation for his flight to Sumatra, he choked on his emotions and quietly said, “So many people have died.” Part of his research involved outreach and education for the local population including posters that instructed the island inhabitants to run inland after a seismic event. Even though he felt so helpless, his work saved lives. We do what we can, however we can.

If you want to make a contribution to a charitable organization that is working in Haiti, I recommend going to Charity Watch for a comprehensive list of top-rated organizations based on how effectively they use donations to meet their aid goals. We chose Doctors Without Borders. Whatever you choose to do, make it count.

There is a recipe for you because I’ve actually been cooking AND shooting despite an insanely busy schedule. Go figure. My only explanation is that we haven’t had any snow. Thankfully, it started snowing Sunday afternoon to my utter delight.

tomatoes and garlic

blanching tomatoes

I don’t tend to post a lot of pasta recipes because I don’t really eat a lot of pasta. I know it sounds strange considering I call myself a noodle-girl, preferring noodles to rice any day of the year. Maybe it’s because I eat rice noodles, cellophane noodles, ramen noodles, somen noodles, soba noodles, udon noodles, All Kinds of Asian noodles, that I never think to make pasta. On occasion though, I have made a pasta sauce that my Chinese mother taught me to make.

peeling the tomatoes

slicing in half

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Recipe: stir-fried soybean sprouts

Oh hurray! It’s so good to be back to normal again. Don’t get me wrong, it was delightful to have a mellow visit with my parents, but to finally be well again is something I cherish very very much. Jeremy and I noted on our flight back to Denver that it feels like we’ve been in a twilight zone for the past month with the travel and the illnesses. I missed out on all of my typical holiday baking and I’m sure that means our local post office will start leaving packages in the backroom for months on end ;) Oddly enough, we here in Colorado are experiencing a “heat wave” of sorts. Seems we always have at least one week of warm weather every January. I’d rather have snow, but… I’ll gladly take a sunny day to walk with my guy and my pup in the mountains sans ground blizzards.

positively balmy at 32°f

patterns on the frozen lake

As long-time readers know, I don’t do new year’s resolutions. I resolve to do things ALL THE TIME regardless of calendar date. That doesn’t mean I don’t have new year’s rituals like… The Changing of the Calendars (for some reason, I get very excited about this). The other thing I do is mark Chinese New Year on my new calendars because it always manages to sneak up on me and you need time to prepare those lucky foods and dishes for the celebration. The Chinese follow the lunar calendar which means all manner of headache for a completely westernized girl like myself. There are also those superstitions like not buying salt for the entire month after Chinese New Year (bad luck). Anyway, I marked it. It’s Valentine’s Day this year. I will make sure to have the appropriate goodies for the party which includes one of my favorite vegetables.

the humble soybean sprout

I have been eating soybean sprouts since I was a wee bern. My mom and grandma would always buy a large bag of them from the Asian market and open the bag up in the middle of the kitchen table where we would gather around plucking the tiny ends off the sprouts. It wasn’t until I got to college, bought a bag and began picking the ends when a roommate informed me that she doesn’t bother plucking the ends off. Well, that certainly saves time! I think it’s a Grandma thing, because last week when I was at my parents’ house, I noticed Mom hadn’t picked the stringy ends off either. I don’t clean the ends anymore, except on Chinese New Year’s Eve – otherwise I’d get a little stabby.

these have been plucked

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