use real butter

Recipe: slider buns

My brain just registered that the Superbowl is this weekend. I knew something was up when I began to see lots of Superbowl party foods posted around the food blogosphere. I’m slow on the uptake sometimes, but I have been really busy getting my photo gallery up. I had a vague awareness that the Superbowl was coming *waves hand in the distance* sometime. Oh, I’m not fooling anyone – I don’t follow football. We don’t own a TV. Can’t stand watching sports, really… I much prefer to play sports.

But I love Superbowl Sunday, because it means hiking trails and ski slopes are empty. Everyone is happy! Aside from keeping the masses glued to the television, I love the Superbowl because it means parties with lots of finger foods. I have a mild obsession with food in miniature and individual servings. One of the great things about urb is that I’ve been shoved out of my comfort zone into the world of bread and yeast. That’s partly due to the Daring Bakers and partly due to my envious ogling of silders in our lovely food blogging community.

i can do this

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: tuiles

Yo, baby! Did I ever mention that *I* am a Daring Baker? Well, I am. And it’s time. Time for another fanfrickingtabulous Daring Bakers challenge!

daring bakers: we knead to bake!

I need to give a shout out to my lovely, wonderful, sexy, smart, and talented founders: Lis of La Mia Cucina and Ivonne of Cream Puffs in Venice, and a huge thanks to our equally lovely, wonderful, sexy, smart, and talented hosts for this month. Here’s the official line:

This month’s challenge is brought to us by Karen of Bake My Day and Zorra of 1x umruehren bitte aka Kochtopf. They have chosen Tuiles from The Chocolate Book by Angélique Schmeink and Nougatine and Chocolate Tuiles from Michel Roux.

Of course, one of the reasons I am so happy about January’s challenge is that we had the option to go savory – which you know I love – based on Thomas Keller’s cornet recipe from The French Laundry Cookbook.

how apropos – we use real butter *snort*

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chocolate bag

Ahh! Finally, I can sit down after a whole day of cooking. In the morning, I baked. Starting from noon until now, I’ve been slicing, dicing, mincing, wincing… Chinese New Year’s Eve is tomorrow, yo. That means I must dedicate at least 24 hours of my time to chopping vegetables and tofu and all manner of Chinese ingredients for the big feast. I guess it’s to preserve my Chineseness since my Mandarin is in the shitter.

Okay, two points.

1) I know a lot of bloggers have this problem and it crops up from time to time for me too. While I was searching online today for a good wine recommendation to pair with Chinese hot pot, I found a PDF with recs from Simon Tam who I think is in Hong Kong. Great! I open the PDF and what greets me is a collage of MY PHOTOS from this post on Chinese hot pot. The fuck?! What is it with folks who ignore the copyright notice, don’t have the decency to ask permission (I usually say yes if you ask first), and then post my photos without giving credit? Jerkwad fuckheads. *Edit: Turns out it was Macau Closer – a glossy magazine – who stole my photos and not Simon (Simon is a nice fellow – he emailed me). That’s great – magazines stealing from bloggers. You assholes.*

2) In my about section, I have a few guidelines about interaction on this blog. The fifth one down states, don’t be rude or nasty. My litmus test is: if your comment was said to my face in my house and my reaction was to 1) haul off and punch you 2) give you the verbal smackdown or 3) kick you out of my house, then you probably violated the fifth guideline. You wanna be an asswipe? Get your own blog and be an asswipe there. That’s what I did.

Yesterday was a squirrel day. I covered a lot of ground in search of ingredients for our Chinese New Year’s celebration. It was a tad frantic at the H Mart in Denver because we were on time constraints and it’s a Korean market, so when I asked where x, y, and z might be, the little Korean employee smiled and then asked me to ask someone else. I say we, not in the sense of the royal we, but as in myself, Manisha, and Kitt. Oh yeah, that same little Korean employee flagged me down and asked me to help another customer… it turned out to be Manisha! Hi-larious. Yeah babe, I know where the dried shrimp are.

kitt was immediately drawn to the crazy gadgets

**Jump for more butter**