use real 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.

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: almond blancmange

Just a few observations and tidbits tonight and then I’m going to send you all off to Tartelette’s place, okay?

So Bridget had asked me about the difference between tempered chocolate and untempered chocolate and if I could show a picture. Why yes indeedy, I can – because I had a lot of out-of-temper chocolates from yesterday’s post.

Recipe: lychee martini

It’s the 18th. One week until Christmas. But I’m not stressing because we don’t celebrate Christmas. It’s not that I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, because in my non-religious family’s house – we celebrated the hell out of Christmas. My mother always made a phenomenal spread for dinner with lots of snacks sprinkled throughout the day to keep us out of the kitchen. As I’ve said before, my family does not have a baking tradition – *I* am the baker. But I do remember that my mom would make cookies once a year: puffy hearts and rings. I think it was a kind of cream puff dough, shaped into… hearts and rings, and spread with pink and green frosting and sprinkled with almond slivers. That frosting contained almond extract, which I looooooooved. I thought my mom was the best baker in the world! Kind of like when I thought my paternal grandmother had really stumbled onto something when she made me my first piece of toast :)