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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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.

Back in the day 5 dumplings for $1 was pretty common in Chinatown. But nothing last forever, especially in NYC. The only 2 places that I know of that still sell dumplings that cheap are Fried Dumpling on Mosco St and Prosperity Dumplings on Eldridge St. And if you want a picture perfect definition of what hole-in-the-wall places look like then these 2 dumpling places are pretty much it. I’ve been to Prosperity Dumplings many times and each time there would be a crowd inside, all trying to get dumplings. On the other hand, I’ve only walked by Fried Dumpling and usually its quite empty. People either know exactly where to look or they randomly discovered it. I was the latter. I was just randomly exploring Chinatown when I first moved here and found it by chance. I’ve must have walked by this place more than a dozen times but never really bothered to try it. Then finally yesterday I was craving for some cheap dumplings and was in the area so I decided to try it out.

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Like my other post about different usage of curry sauce, this time is all about the Pad Thai sauce. Yes Pad Thai sauce is mainly used for well making Pad Thai. But I thought heck if you have a giant bottle of this stuff maybe you can use it some other way. Pad Thai sauce is super easy to make, all you need is 3 maybe 4 ingredients. It’s 1 part tamarind juice, 1 part palm sugar and 1 part fish sauce. Pour all the ingredients into a pot and just cook it till the sugar dissolves. Thats it! Yes I did say maybe 4 ingredients and the 4th is chili paste or sriracha to give it a little heat but of course you don’t want to add 1 part sriracha maybe just enough to your liking. Also I added a stick of cinnamon and few star anise just for the heck of it. I have found that a 1/4 cup of each ingredient will yield enough for 4-5 servings of Pad Thai. All you really need is 2-3 tablespoons for each person.

So here are few dishes that I came up with that used Pad Thai sauce.
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Feeling a bit lazy this past Saturday and you know what, I hate feeling lazy. The sun was out, a bit muggy and icky but at least the sun was out and I wanted to be outside doing things. Recently I found out that there is a guy in Sunset Park, 61st St and 8th Ave right outside of the 8th Ave stop on the N train that makes FRESH rice rolls with his rice roll cart. Rice rolls aka cheung fun, if you don’t know, is a thin piece of rice flour crepe steamed, rolled up with beef, shrimp, fish, roast pork or plain and served with soy sauce at dim sum places. Rice rolls are pretty much up at the top of my dim sum must eats along with siu mai, tunrip cakes, chicken feet and ja leung. My favorite rice roll has to be the roast pork but for some reason its rare to find them in NYC, why is that? I think my next favorite would be fish. Hmmmm. Anyways, so by 11am I was off on my rice roll cart hunt!

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