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.

Clikc to continue for the recipe

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.

Click for the recipe

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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This week I decided to make this dessert because I was lucky enough to get stroopwafels straight from Amsterdam! I have couple friends that live there and they brought me some stroopwafels. Yay!!

So all I needed to make this were couple bananas. The recipe said to warm up the stroopwafels in the oven but I was too lazy to so I heated them up in a pan with a super low flame. Oh I can’t tell you how wonderful it smelled in the kitchen of warm stroopwafel-y smell. AAAhhhhhhhhhhhh. This dessert was REALLY good warm bananas, caramel-y, went perfect with the scoop of vanilla ice cream. YUM!

Springtime brings some interesting things to the market; things like fiddlehead ferns. I’ve cooked with fiddleheads before, but I wanted something quick, easy and light. I ended up blanching the fiddleheads in salted boiling water (a necessary step to properly clean them), and then sauteing them with sliced asparagus in olive oil with salt and pepper until they were just tender. I added some fresh lemon juice, and then when that cooked down I poured in the liquid from a can of tomatoes. I cooked this down for just a few minutes, re-seasoned, and then tossed with some gemelli pasta. It was a great expression of early spring, and it was delicious.

Well all about the Japanese curry to be more precise. There’s always a box of House Curry Mild in my kitchen because it’s damn easy to cook this. Cook some veggies or some meat or some both or not, then add water and the curry. Cook until the curry has all been dissolved and veggies/meats are done. One box of curry has about 12 servings and I usually use the whole box. I just love curry! One of my food mission when I was still living in LA was to go to all of the Curry Houses but I only made it to 4 Anyways, I usually invite people over when I make a big pot of curry but even then I end up with a large container of leftover curry that would last me for another 4 meals. Yes I said I love curry but even I get bored of eating curry over rice for more than 2-3 times. So what I usually do is freeze the rest of the curry or change it up a bit.

One night I found myself craving for curry and of course I made a giant pot. But instead of freezing the rest I came up with the idea of creating other dishes with the same curry sauce.

Click to see what I came up with