Mussels with white wine & basil oil broth
So my next Jamie Oliver recipe, I wanted a seafood dish. I narrowed it down to 2 dishes, one was a tomato-y pasta with canned tuna and the second was a spaghetti with mussels dish. Both Steph and Mo voted for the mussels dish, so mussels it is.

Why are mussels so cheap? They’re usually $2-$3 per pound and I bought 2.5lbs of it. Though I should’ve bought the extra half pound because there were few dead ones in the pile.

This whole dish took about 25mins to prep and to cook. While it was fairly easy and straightforward to cook I wasn’t too sure of the end product. It’s hard to know if I cooked it right or not if I haven’t tasted it before. I guess it only matters if the dish was good or not. Well I thought the dish was just alright, it was kind of bland and I was heavy handed with the pepper, whoops. I just didn’t taste any basil or any flavors from the basil oil broth. Overall this was okay.

Click here for the recipe

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Plate
Couple weeks ago my friend Anh had her “Breakfast in Brooklyn” get together where she made breakfast for everyone. I was pretty excited because she promised to make a Vietnamese omelette! What’s a Vietnamese omelette? It’s an omelette with diced onions, chicken liver pate and pork roll! Genius! Its everything I love in 1 dish. I had tried to make this couple nights before but I wasn’t sure about the proportions. Also the recipe she gave me didn’t include the pork roll, what da? Anyways, this was a really yummy omelette, I wanna eat it all the time.
Baked eggsVietnamese omelette
Texas omelette, home fries, baked eggs and Vietnamese coffee were also on the menu. I brought the St-Viateur bagels and others brought biscuits and pastries from Ladybird Bakery.

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Feb 20th 2010
I have seen tiny spots of blood in eggs before but this was TOO CRAZY!

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Tea flavored ribs
I saved the ribs that came with the 9lb pork belly I bought for our 2 year party so that I could use it later. This is probably not the way to cook ribs but I first boiled it then roasted it in the oven. The liquid that I used to boil the ribs in was tea! and star anise. Yes tea. Think it was 2 cups of tea and 8 star anise. Boiled it for about an hour. Then I took the ribs out placed it in the roasting tray, seasoned it and cooked it in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour then cranked it up to 500 degrees.

The end result was pretty good. A little on the dry side but I could really taste the tea and that extra salt I added before roasting was super nice!

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Jamie At Home: Pasta Peperonata
Yes Jamie At Home is the name of Jamie Oliver’s cookbook and also one of this cooking show. But this is me cooking a Jamie Oliver recipe at my own home. I know this idea of cooking through a cookbook and blogging about isn’t new but in my attempt to cook more and actually use the cookbooks I need to document it. Sorta like homework. I’m less lazy if its homework. Also I’m not cooking through 1 book, I’m merely just cooking any of his recipes from books, magazines and website.

So here is my first attempt of this Jamie at Home weekly post (lets see how long this goes eh?) Pasta Peperonata, found here on his website. Oh man this one was so simple to make but I really hate cleaning and slicing bell peppers. In the recipe, creme fraiche or mascarpone cheese is optional but if you ask me it should be a must. I just love a good creamy pasta sauce. Basically you just slice everything, saute everything, stir in the creme fraiche and add pasta and parsley, done! This was really good! The bell peppers were sweet and tasty though my apartment smelled like peppers for few days.
Jamie At Home: Pasta PeperonataJamie At Home: Pasta Peperonata
Jamie At Home: Pasta PeperonataJamie At Home: Pasta Peperonata

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plate of fooddessert
porchettacanneloni
Recently we celebrated our 2 year with a party similar to our 1 year party. We’re lucky to have such great friends that are supportive to us and to our blog. So to say thank you Howard and I cooked a meal. It was also to see if we had learned anything new about cooking.
Continue to see what we cooked for the party

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