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

I used to live on the corner of E 3rd St and Avenue A, and I loved the neighborhood. This was before this blog existed, but I still was excited about the many food options available to me: Nicky’s Vietnamese Sandwiches, Mama’s, and a 24-hour Key Food, among others. I was not, however, aware of the existence of Perbacco, an Italian restaurant that blends tradition and the avant-garde. Lucky for me my friends Jess & Garrett knew about it, and the three of us met there for dinner last week. Lucky for you also, because their photos came out much better than mine (click the link to their blog if you don’t believe me).

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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.

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

Sometimes you get so caught up in going to the newest, hippest, most happening restaurants in town — What’s got great buzz? What’s been reviewed recently? What’s the newest trend? — that you forget that there are plenty of restaurants that have been around for a while. It takes a visit to a real veteran restaurant to make you realize what it takes to run a successful restaurant in New York City. At a recent dinner at Po (after a few drinks at Vol de Nuit) with my friends Jeff & Eva, we had just such a revelation.

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I watch Lidia Bastianich on television quite a bit. In some ways she stands in for the Italian grandmother I never had, complete with exhortations to join her (and her family) at her table to eat. I’d been meaning to check out Felidia for a couple of years now, but somehow never made it. My family has started a little bit of a tradition in the past few years: when my parents, my sister, and I are all in town, we try to go out to a fancy meal. With thoughts of family in my head, I realized Felidia would be a perfect place to go.

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