Author: Allison

Head-on, garlic-fried shrimp

Post author By Allison
Post date May 11, 2018
1 Comment on Head-on, garlic-fried shrimp

Missed the stream? Watch it on Twitch!

Yesterday, May 10th, was National Shrimp Day! I don’t celebrate all food holidays… but when I do, it’s because I want a good excuse to make something I want to eat.

Like shrimp.

You’ve all probably guessed by now that we really love garlic around here. So it’s no surprise that I went for the garlickiest shrimp recipe I could find.

I doctored some of the Japanese mayo we made a few weeks ago with some lime juice and lime zest, to go with the shrimp. And let me tell you… it was all sooooo good.

I mean, crispy-shelled shrimp, garlic out the wazoo, succulent shrimp, tangy mayo. Where can you go wrong?

Today’s Question of the Day: What is your favorite shrimp preparation? Do you suck the head? Do you eat the shells?

Visit my Twitch stream to catch up on past streams, and hang out when I’m streaming! Want to know when I’m in the kitchen? Hit the follow button (the heart up top) so you’ll get notifications when I’m live – it’s always free to follow! Or you can follow me on Instagram or Twitter, where I usually post when I’m starting the stream.

Tags garlic, shrimp, Twitch

Twitch Streaming

Berry bran muffins

Post author By Allison
Post date April 24, 2018

Missed the stream? Watch it on Twitch!

This was one of those “everything that could go wrong, will” kind of streams.

Somebody… not naming any names… kept us both awake super late because he (again, not naming any names) got sucked into watching God of War streams on Twitch and wouldn’t stop talking to the other member of the couple about it. So we got to bed around 4am.

So of course we woke up late, had trouble getting our butts in gear because we were tired, and then started way too late.

I had originally planned to make this fruit salad. And then I looked in my fridge right after Son clicked “Start Stream” in OBS (the stream management program we use), and discovered that my greek yogurt had gone bad.

Crap.

So I ran back to my computer and scrambled for a replacement… and finally found a custard recipe that looked like it would be a good replacement.

Okay. Everything else should be fine, right?

A few days before, Son asked me to make some extra fun components for his plating “art” portion of the stream. We were browsing through Payard Desserts and he saw some things he wanted me to try. So before the stream I candied some mint (which actually turned out fine). I also attempted to make something called arlettes – pretty much mini elephant ears/half-sized pamiers. Those went… poorly. So I threw the actual instructions out the window which involved rolling out slices of refrigerated rolls of puff pastry, and just baked the slices as is. (Which worked fine, but… still not how they were supposed to go.)

What should have been a two- to three-hour stream turned into a five hour stream.

But! We made muffins and they were delicious! It’s berry season, and I’ve been trying to find some healthier breakfasty things, so bran muffins it was. I found this recipe for bran muffins on Smitten Kitchen, and in it she also linked to an older recipe for sour cream bran muffins on her blog that she said was a lighter version more suited to bran newbies.

For the first recipe, I used a mix of fresh berries – two raspberries, one raspberry, half a blackberry, and a few pieces of diced strawberry in each muffin. I also topped half of the muffins with a few pieces of semi-sweet chocolate, which let me tell you, was an excellent decision that I highly recommend. Thanks to the liquid from the berries, this actually turned out to be a very moist, tender muffin – not the dry, dense texture you might expect from a bran muffin. They were delicious, and of the two, my favorite.

The sour cream bran muffin recipe called for dried fruit, so I used dried cranberries. Like the first muffins, I also topped half of these with chocolate pieces, which again was a wonderful decision. These were not as tender as the first recipe, but were still delicious. Thanks to the cranberries and cinnamon in the recipe, these taste like Christmas to me. Definitely more of a fall flavor, but I’ll happily eat these year-round!

Today’s Question of the Day: What is your favorite type of muffin?

Tags arlette, berries, blackberry, blueberry, breakfast, mint, muffin, puff pastry, raspberry, strawberry, stream, Twitch

Twitch Streaming

Sushi Saturdays: California Rolls and Kappa Maki

Post author By Allison
Post date April 22, 2018
1 Comment on Sushi Saturdays: California Rolls and Kappa Maki

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Sushi Saturday is baaaaaack!

After a bit of a break (thanks to ramen, poke, and the flu), we’re back to making sushi every Saturday. As some of you know, Sushiday has been around a looooong time. We started the blog back in 2006, and it kind of shows. All the photos on our old sushi posts are from way back when Son knew nothing about photography. In other words, they’re bad. Really bad.

So we’re using Sushi Saturdays as an excuse to remake all the old sushi, and retake all the photos so we can update the old posts! Slowly but surely we’re making our way through all our really old sushi recipes (while also getting distracted by making brand new sushi here and there).

This week, we’re remaking some of the first rolls we ever posted on Sushiday: kappa maki, california roll, baja california roll, and the new zealand roll.

This time, we used some homemade Kewpie mayo leftover from our Japanese egg salad sandwich stream for all of the California rolls, which was SO good. When we were eating up all the leftovers after the stream, Son kept commenting, “These are the best California rolls you’ve ever made.” If anything, they were definitely better than the California rolls I made twelve years ago!

Today’s Question of the Day: What is your favorite sushi roll?

Tags California roll, Japan, sushi, Sushi Saturdays

Twitch Streaming

Garlic Salmon Pasta with Super Garlicky Garlic Bread

Post author By Allison
Post date April 20, 2018
1 Comment on Garlic Salmon Pasta with Super Garlicky Garlic Bread

Missed the stream? Watch it on Twitch!

There are a ton of food “holidays” out there.

“National Pineapple Upside-Down Cake Day”

“Lima Bean Respect Day”

“Chocolate-Covered Cashew Truffle Day”

(You think I’m kidding. Seriously, those are the actual food holidays for April 20th and 21st!)

Most of the time I skip them. I’m usually meh about most of them, and the ones I know of lean heavily towards American and European foods. (Seriously, where’s my International Pho Day? Ramen Respect Day? Kimchi Celebration Month? I’d be all over those food holidays.)

But every now and then, there’s a food holiday that I just have to celebrate… either because it’s super nerdy (oh hi, Pi Day) or because it just gives me a really good excuse to make a food I want to eat.

In other words… well hello there, National Garlic Day. Fancy meeting you here.

We are crazy for garlic in this household (plus I really just wanted a good excuse to make this “OMG Garlic bread” that we made on stream in January again, but this time we used garlic cheddar bread. so good.), so of course I had to make sure we celebrated National Garlic Day. Obviously.

And since garlic bread isn’t quiiiite a meal all by itself… oh darn, guess I’ll just make it an entire garlic dinner. What a difficult life I live.

I had planned to make this garlicky pasta and top it with this garlicky salmon. But unbeknownst to me, most of my onions went bad… so caramelized onions were out of the picture. Instead, we just made the salmon and used it as a sauce for the pasta… which was delicious! Such a good sauce. Still want to make that garlicky caramelized onion pasta one of these days though…

… in the meantime, I’ll just be over here hoarding garlic bread…

Today’s Question of the Day: What is your favorite pasta dish?

Tags fish, garlic, garlic bread, Italian, pasta, salmon, Twitch

Twitch Streaming

Spinach, chorizo, and chickpea frittata

Post author By Allison
Post date April 18, 2018
1 Comment on Spinach, chorizo, and chickpea frittata

Missed the stream? Watch it on Twitch!

For the last five months, five days a week, I’ve been cooking something different every day for my Twitch stream. It’s been an amazing experience, and I’ve gotten to cook so many things that have been on my “to cook” list for years.

At first, we went all out. But after a while, I realized that the decadent lifestyle – roast duck, bolognese, ramen, etc. – just isn’t sustainable for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed all the crazy fun things I’ve gotten to make. (And no worries… it’s not stopping anytime soon!) But the start of streaming coincided perfectly with me entirely stopping working out (due to both how busy streaming kept me at first, and also an intentional break to let some injuries heal). Not great.

I’ve realized I (and my body) are happiest when I get a healthy, filling breakfast. I can eat random shit the rest of the time, but as long as I get a good breakfast, I’m good to go.

So that, and an overabundance of spinach in my fridge that needed to be used up, led to today’s menu – two healthy, filling, spinachy, and hopefully tasty breakfast options.

The first recipe is a chickpea, spinach, chorizo frittata. Not the easiest to make from scratch in the morning, but if you can manage it ahead of time (over the weekend, maybe?) it’s easy to reheat a wedge on a weekday morning. On its own I found it to be a little one-note (although definitely filling and fairly healthy), however with a dollop of your favorite salsa, it’s exxxxxcellent. 4 out of 5 stars, would make again.

As for the second recipe, which was a green shakshuka recipe… I’m gonna go ahead and chalk it up to use error. Even though it seems like something I would love, and I’ve made things from Jenny and Teri’s blog before that turned out great… I was very much not a fan of this dish, so I’m going to assume I took a wrong turn somewhere.

Regardless… the frittata was great! And we’ll try out a more traditional shakshuka recipe one of these days. Can’t win ’em all.

Today’s Question of the Day: What is your favorite savory breakfast? (Even better if it’s healthy – I need breakfast ideas!)

Tags breakfast, chickpea, chorizo, frittata, stream, Twitch

Twitch Streaming

Asian-Style Green Beans with Bacon

Post author By Allison
Post date April 17, 2018

Missed the stream? Watch it on Twitch!

“You should make green beans soon!” For once, Son actually had a specific request for the stream, after seeing one of our Twitch viewers talk about a stir-fry they were making for dinner that night.

I’m always looking for input from him on what I should make (usually at least once a week, I’ll ask him to pick a cookbook, country, or vegetable to help me figure out a future stream), so green beans went on the menu. Originally I was going to make green beans with xo sauce, but given that some of the ingredients for that are pricier and a bit more obscure (I’m lookin’ at you, dried scallops), I tabled that for a future stream and went looking for a more reasonable menu.

Asian-style green beans with pork belly? Sounds good to me.

Since we didn’t have pork belly on hand but do always have bacon, I switched out the crispy pork belly part of the recipe for bacon. And while I can’t judge the tastiness of the pork belly in the dish, since I obviously didn’t make it, I can definitely assert that bacon is an excellent replacement. Holy cow. So good.

The dish is flavorful, with just a tad bit of sweet and spicy going on, and the bacon cooked in it almost takes on the flavor of bacon jam. It’s so good. Plus it’s green beans, so… we can definitely claim that it’s healthy, right?

Today’s Question of the Day: What are your favorite dishes to get when you go out for Chinese food?

Tags Asia, Asian, bacon, China, Chinese, green beans, stir-fry, Twitch, vegetable

Twitch Streaming

Chocolate cheesecake-stuffed strawberries, and chocolate raspberry madeleines

Post author By Allison
Post date April 13, 2018

Missed the stream? Watch it on Twitch!

When mom requests something for the stream… we make it happen. So when she sent me a link to these chocolate cheesecake-stuffed strawberries that she found on Fridgg, it went on the menu right away!

We were lucky enough to find huge, beautiful, ruby-red strawberries at our local farmer’s market, which worked wonderfully for this. From there it’s easy enough to mix up the chocolate cheesecake filling, and pipe it into (or in our case, use a knife to fill) the strawberries. At my mom’s suggestion, I drizzled the strawberries with melted dark chocolate instead of using sprinkles.

How did they turn out? Well… we ran the risk of mom not getting any, because we couldn’t stop eating them during the stream. And mom has already requested that we make these for her regularly during strawberry season. Suffice to say, you REALLY need to make these, ASAP. Sweet, flavorful strawberries + a creamy, chocolatey filling + the texture and flavor contrast of the hardened, slightly bitter dark chocolate = such an amazing dessert.

Since the strawberries were so easy to make and we didn’t want the stream to be *too* short, I also decided to make chocolate raspberry madeleines (because mom is a huge chocolate-raspberry fan). I borrowed a madeleine pan from my mom, and whipped these up during the stream as well.

Even though I used frozen raspberries instead of fresh, these turned out wonderfully. The madeleines are cakey, super chocolatey, but not too sweet, with a surprising fresh tang when you bite into a raspberry, and a touch of sweetness from the ganache. Mom loved these too, although she did request that next time I try making them with seedless raspberry jam (the one thing I hate most about raspberries is how the seeds never fail to get stuck in your teeth!)

All in all, today’s fruity chocolatey desserts were a huge success!

Today’s Question of the Day: If you could have someone make you any food you wanted for your birthday, what would it be?

Tags cheesecake, chocolate, dessert, madeleine, raspberry, strawberry

Twitch Streaming

Curry Grilled Cheese

Post author By Allison
Post date April 12, 2018

Missed the stream? Watch it on Twitch!

I love it when food holidays give me an excuse to make something that I might not ordinarily have on the menu. We don’t make grilled cheese sandwiches very often around here, but since today’s National Grilled Cheese Day, I had to make it happen, right?

I decided to make this decadent, but oh so true to our tastes, curry grilled cheese sandwich. Now, the raspberry jam part of it might sound odd, I know. But it is an absolutely necessary part of the recipe (although you can definitely switch out the type of jam – we used strawberry). You can’t really taste the jam that much, but the hint of sweetness it adds to the super savory, undeniably umami curry filling pushes the sandwich to the next level.

We tripled the recipe, which made a ton of sandwiches. But rather than try to give them away to friends and family like we normally might, most of them went straight into the freezer, to reheat whenever we’re low on leftovers. In other words, yes, I’m totally hoarding these. They’re that good.

Today’s Question of the Day: What is the most interesting thing you’ve ever cooked?

Tags beef, curry, grilled cheese, Japanese curry, raspberry jam

Twitch Streaming

“Vampire Slayer” Ramen

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RAMEN!!!

I’ve been wanting to make ramen for years. Years and years and years. And ever since I started my Twitch cooking stream, it’s been one of the top things on my list of todos.

It would’ve been easy to be paralyzed by “which one to make?”, or, “which ramen should be my first?” But when I came across a recipe named the “Vampire Slayer Ramen Express”, from the excellent Mandy of Lady and Pups, it went straight to the top of my list.

I mean, look at all that garlic. I don’t even care if it’s not traditional, it had to happen.

I got a head start on Saturday’s stream (ramen prep in lieu of our usual Sushi Saturday), so with the ramen eggs marinating, menma cooked, and chicken broth already in the fridge, finishing the ramen was a neat five-hour stream. (If I’d tried to do it all in one day… it likely would have been closer to 24-hours.)

The chashu was a simple sear, then stick it in the oven and wait. Since I had two and a half hours to kill, I tried something else I’ve been wanting to do for years… milk tea! (No boba this time, only because it was a last minute addition to the menu and I had none in the house.)

I used this Milk Tea recipe from Chichilicious, which was basically just very strong black tea, plus sweetened condensed milk. Oh so good. 10/10, would make again.

So on a massive caffeine and sugar high (wheee!), I made the garlic powder, garlic oil… and then finished up the ramen!

The biggest question from our chat is… was it worth the two days of work?

Both Son and my answers? A resounding YES.

Holy cow, it’s so good. (And SO garlicky. You definitely have to love garlic to eat this ramen.) While the chicken broth by itself was surprisingly light yet flavorful, the broth itself is thick, has an fantastic depth of flavor, and is so rich that you can’t eat more than one bowl. Exactly what you’d expect from a good bowl of ramen.

And when you add in all the other toppings? EVEN BETTER. The menma turned out deliciously, I’m still swooning over the ramen eggs (I don’t think I can make soft-boiled eggs any other way now), the chashu is oh so good, and I love that the garlic oil and garlic powder add EVEN MORE LAYERS OF GARLIC.

(There is no such thing as too much garlic.)

Also, since I’m writing this the next day, I can tell you that leftovers? Also excellent.

I may have to go steal another ramen egg from the fridge.

Today’s Question of the Day: What is your favorite kind of ramen?

Tags Japanese, ramen, stream, Twitch