Food Coma

We had a dusting of snow in Utah for Thanksgiving. It made for a beautiful scenic drive to my sister-in-law's family's house for Thanksgiving dinner.

As I mentioned in previous posts, we are a family of foodies and eaters, and Thanksgiving is no exception.  We cooked up a storm, literally all day. 

Holidays for us usually consist of lots and lots of cooking of authentic Chinese cuisine, especially the treats that are time consuming.  My sister-in-law's parents taught us how to make fried savory pork "doughnuts".  The batter is made out of ground soybeans and rice flour. 

A whole bag of rice flour goes into the mixture.

 

The dough is placed on a special metal utensil, then a pork and chive filling added.

 

 Then more dough to cover the filling. Final step is to add some raw peanuts on top.

 

The metal ladle is placed into a wok of hot oil and fried until crispy brown.

Here are the doughnuts fritters all finished.  These are not sweet, they are savory with a pork and chive filling.  They are absolutely delicious right out of the fryer.

 

For dinner, we had a mostly traditional turkey dinner.  The turkey was brined overnight and perfectly seasoned.  My sister-in-law carved the turkey, she did an amazing job with it.

I made scalloped potatoes au gratin.  This recipe called for 4 cups of heavy cream, cheddar cheese, Parmigiano cheese, and butter, oh my is it completely rich!!  Thank goodness we only eat this once a year, it is complete gluttony!

Table full of delicious food, crab cakes, stuffed mussels, yams, honey baked ham, stuffing, sooo good!

For dessert, we did mostly Chinese desserts. I made 2 dan tat pies, or Hong Kong style egg custard tart. 

And soybean peanut rice balls.  These are rice flour balls, with peanut sugar on the inside and crushed toasted soybean on the outside.  Oooh are these ever good.  With all this eating, I feel like eating salads for the rest of the week.   Hope everyone had a healthy and happy Thanksgiving!

Korean Comfort Food

Pretty much anywhere you drive near Salt Lake City, you get mountain vistas like this one of the Wasatch Mountains.  Just stunning! The Wasatch mountains are the western edge of the Rocky Mountain range.  This is the view we saw on our way to the Asian market to pick up some ingredients for dinner last week.  We have been cooking up a storm and on this night, on the menu Jap Chae, or Korean Noodles and Korean Seafood Scallion Pancake.

Jap Chae is one of my favorite dishes to make.  It calls for Sweet Potato clear noodles with julienne shredded carrots, red peppers, scallions, shitake mushrooms, spinach and your choice of meat or firm tofu.  The flavoring is a mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil, and sugar.  This can be eaten warm or room temperature.  Delicious!

My other favorite Korean dish to make is seafood scallion pancakes.  In a bowl I mix 1 egg, 1 cup of water and 1 1/2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1/4 teaspoon of pepper.  Add 5 minced scallions and seafood of choice.  For this one, I used 1/2 pound of shrimp.  Cook in a skillet like any other pancake and serve with sweet soy sauce dip.  For dip, I use soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, sugar and water.  Korean comfort food... Sooo good! 

Antelope Island

Last weekend, we took a ride down to Antelope Island State Park, the largest island in the Great Salt Lake.  The island is uninhabited but it is home to lots of wildlife, including a free-roaming herd of 500 bison, antelope, pronghorn and bighorn sheep.  We drove around for an hour or so before we spotted some bison.  Can you see them in this photo?  Hahahaha, It's way out in the distance.  Unfortunately, I only had my crappy cellphone camera with me.  It's funny how there are over 500 bison on the island and yet it took us an hour to find them.  We were wondering, "where were they hiding??"

Then we saw a little herd of bison that was only about 50 feet from the road.  They actually looked much closer than this in person, but my cell camera doesn't do it justice.  From wikipedia, "The bison were introduced to the island in 1893, and the bison has proven to be a valuable genetic pool for bison breeding and conservation purposes. The bison do well because much of the island is covered by dry, native grassland."  It was such a cool experience to see the bison up close.  The most amazing thing ever to see wild bison in natural habitat.  Truly awesome!  I only wish this photo was better!

Chinese Comfort Food: Part 2

The cooking up a storm hasn't ended.  This past weekend we made Lo Mai Gai or otherwise known as lotus leaf wrapped chicken with sticky rice.  This is not something we ever made from scratch before.  It's something we normally get at dim sum because it is so labor intensive to make.  And since it takes forever to make, we made a batch of 30 of them.  So that we could freeze them and enjoy whenever we are in the mood to have a tasty treat.  This is what lotus leaves look like. The recipe we followed can be found here.  Use this recipe and not my bad instruction below.
http://sunflower-recipes.blogspot.com/2009/07/lo-mai-gai-glutinous-rice-parcel.html

The lotus leaves need to be soaked for 10 minutes on each side in boiling water to soften.

This recipe uses sticky glutinous rice. We made a big batch of rice to stuff the leaves with.

In addition to the rice, for the filling we used chicken, chinese dried sausage, and shitake mushrooms.

Put some filling in, rice first, then meat, then more rice.

Then wrap it like a present.

Make sure when you wrap it, that it is really tight.

Put the wrapped parcels into a steamer and steam for 25 minutes.

Waiting for these babies to steam was the hardest part.

And here are half of them all done.  We froze these for future good eating.

This is what it looks like cooked and ready to eat.  Yummy yumminess!