What is it about mom’s cooking that everyone seems to love and remember? Especially the Italians! Is it because we eat it so much that we love it or are we just a bunch of nostalgic people or maybe all our moms are just crazy incredible good cooks? Now that I have moved to NYC and my family in LA I rarely get to eat my mom’s cooking. So every time I go home I ask my mom to make specific dishes. But BUT there is one dish that my mom makes that I just can’t get enough of and its chicken wings with thing slices of potatoes cooked in coconut milk. It’s so frakkin good. Maybe because I love rice so much I can scoop a bunch of sauce onto the rice and eat it non-stop. Whenever I eat this dish I tend to eat couple extra bowls of rice. SO GOOD!

Then I thought well maybe it was time for me to actually learn how to make this dish so that I can have it whenever I want. I gave making this dish a try many years ago and totally F’ed it up. I had the correct ingredients but in incorrect amount. What came out of it was a bland watery chicken with potato soup instead of a thick stew like dish. Fast forward to just eh few weeks ago I gave this dish another try. This time instead of pouring the whole can of chicken stock in like last time I followed what my mom told me and poured just enough to cover the potatoes. Sorry if the recipe I’m about to give you isn’t really a proper recipe. Heck my mom didn’t give me a proper recipe either and my mom being a mom told me what moms usually say when giving their kids recipes. A pinch of this and handful of that and just enough of that.

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One of the things that I regularly keep in my kitchen is a tin of anchovies, most of the time bought at Trader Joe’s. I thought it has been toooo tooooooo long since last I made anything from a Jamie Oliver cookbook and it was time. Also few months ago my friends S & S finally gave me my Xmas present and HELLO it was the Jamie’s Food Revolution cookbook. This cookbook is geared towards people that can’t really cook so to me means simple recipes! I was flipping through the book and came upon this recipe for Pasta Al Pangrattato. All you need are bread crumbs, anchovies, thyme, dried chili and pasta. Luckily I had everything except thyme. Once I got the thyme I prepped everything and made the dish. FYI, the anchovies that Trader Joe sells do not melt in the pan. I have tried it many times and every time they don’t melt like they should. I have bought anchovies from higher end grocery stores and they do melt.

I wasn’t a big fan of this dish because it was too dry. I like my pasta with a bit of sauce but this was hella easy to make and good way to use up old bread.

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If you have a lot of heavy cream and need to use it up, what will you do? I have already used some of the cream to make whipped cream for ice cream and I was in the mood for some pasta. But I can only use so much cream in a pasta dish. Then I came up with this idea. Just like cooking chicken or pork in milk what if I cooked the vegetables in heavy cream and let it cooked till most of the cream evaporated away. I really wanted to make a broccoli pasta dish but I was kind of lazy to have to deal with chopping the broccoli and having little bits of broccoli flying everywhere. So….what about carrots? I never had carrots in my pasta before and I thought I was being a GENIUS until I googled carrots in pasta and found a bunch. Anyways here’s what I made.

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I had purchased some squash blossoms from the Farmer’s Market, and I was trying to decide what to do with them. I usually stuff them with cheese and fry them, but I didn’t really want to fry anything. Then I remembered I had about a dozen cherry tomatoes left over from making a tomato and okra stew, and I realized I could put the tomatoes inside of the blossoms. Since I didn’t want to fry, and boiling obviously wouldn’t work, I thought I’d try baking them in the oven. I even went out and bought a pack of toothpicks to help this work.

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So its 4th of July weekend and I’m preeeetty sure someone out there will have a BBQ and I’m preeeeeetty sure someone out there will have tons of leftover food from BBQing. At a recent BBQ my apartmentmate and I threw our friends Scott and Steph brought over kebabs! Skewers and skewers of shrimp, onion, mushroom, and bell peppers. Then one night I was trying to figure out what to eat I opened the fridge and saw the leftover kebabs and thought WOW these are perfect ingredients for a fried rice! And thats what I made for dinner.

I was really craving for anything salt and pepper. Salt and pepper squid, salt and pepper pork chop and salt and pepper shrimp. I wanted to try and make it but wasn’t tooooo sure the exact recipe. But I think all you need to do is first deep fried the squid or pork chops or shrimps then in a hot wok cook garlic and peppers and then add in the squid or pork chops or shrimps. Right?

Well I guess eventually what I made was different yet similar. I got a pound of ground pork, garlic, ginger, scallions, onion, bull’s horn chili, and Thai basil.

This will cook fast so get all the prep work done before you start cooking. Diced up 1 whole medium sized onion, grated a piece of ginger which yield about 1.5 tablespoons, diced a WHOLE bulb of garlic, sliced couple scallions, get a about cup worth of the basil and sliced up the chili without the seeds. I realized after eating this the bull’s horn chili isn’t spicy at all, I think next time I’ll chop up some jalapenos. So to make this dish, heat up a wok. Get it really hot then add about a tablespoon or 2 of oil. Throw in the ground pork and cook it till they’re just about done, then put the pork into a bowl. Put the diced up onions and cook it till they’re translucent then throw in the rest of the ingredients. Stir stir stir! When everything’s about done, add the pork back in and stir stir stir, mix mix mix. Season it with salt and pepper to your liking. Annnnnndd done.

This goes AWESOME with plain rice.