use real butter

Recipe: bostini cream pie

This month, I joined the Daring Bakers which has exploded as far as membership goes. The Daring Bakers is an online community of people who bake a recipe selected by a host each month, and then post about the experience and the outcome on the same day. Our host was Mary of alpineberry who chose Bostini Cream Pie for this month’s DB challenge, and today is the day everyone is posting. Go to the blogroll to see everyone’s fine creations!

The Bostini is a variation on an old favorite, the Boston cream pie. The main components are: pastry cream, orange chiffon cake, and chocolate glaze. So I began with the pastry cream, because I looooove pastry cream. Love to eat it, love to make it.

crème patisserie: mixing in the yolks

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Recipe: carne adovada

I didn’t always like to make food from scratch, you know. I was perfectly happy living in So Cal and paying for truly excellent food over 15 years ago. It was authentic, delicious, and cheap. When I moved away from So Cal to go to graduate school, I moved away from great ethnic food. So I began learning to make it myself. By the time we returned to So Cal, I viewed food differently than before. I tasted everything we ate with a running mental analysis of the flavors, the ingredients, the preparation, and how I could make it at home. At some point, I had crossed the barrier that always led me to believe a dish was out of my reach. No longer!

Now that we’ve moved to a small mountain town, I’m stuck craving those fantastic ethnic foods again. But now, I am eager to try making them at home, and perfecting them.

When my in-laws lived in New Mexico, we used to visit and drop by El Modelo for amazing New Mexican fare. One of my favorites was their carne adovada. I mean, how can I not love pork – I’m Chinese and I grew up in the South, so there is a double whammy right there!

my second-favorite product of new mexico: red chiles
my favorite being jeremy

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Recipe: chinese vegetarian chicken

*Edit*: Oh, I see that I can enter this into Coffee & Vanilla’s Vegetarian Awareness Month Event! October 1st was World Vegetarian Day. Here’s the banner and go join if you can:

*End Edit*

I love tofu. Love it raw, love it dried, fried, shredded, diced, pressed, in soups, in sheets, in stir-fries, in braises… Back in the day, when I mentioned tofu to white people, they would make a face and say, “yech!” But as granolas and vegetarians grew in numbers, so did tofu’s popularity. I’m not vegetarian. I love animals and I love to eat them. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like vegetarian food. One of my favorite haunts in Monterey Park was a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant (Happy Family – anyone know where it went? It’s now an empty lot). Asian vegetarian food is really Effingham delicious.

Whenever I visit my Grandma in California, she insists on sending me home with several times the volume of my duffel bag in food. Let’s see, she’ll hand me a few pounds of fruit, several packages of Chinese snacks, lots of dried goods, and a “loaf” of her homemade Chinese vegetarian chicken. I love that stuff. She taught me how to make it a few years ago, but I never tried until yesterday.

Vegetarian chicken?! That’s the translation of su ji. From what I’ve gathered, Buddhist monks were masters of preparing tofu in many delicious ways. They are vegetarian. I don’t think they eat garlic either because it is the root of the plant, thus destroying the plant. Emperors used to dig this style of food and would have the monks prepare meals for them. Well, you don’t just prepare any old slop for the Emperor. They made dishes that mimicked chicken, fish, squid, duck… out of tofu. The monks even went so far as to insert tiny slivers of bamboo to resemble fish bones. I learned about all of this when my parents dragged me to a Buddhist temple in LA for my mom’s college reunion.

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