Pink Cat's Special 3-Rice Fried Rice

Red jasmine rice, regular jasmine rice, and basmati rice.

What's in it: tofu, scallions, eggs, green beans, corn, chili flakes, broccoli (or whatever veggies you have on hand... carrots, peas, etc.) Remember to finish it off with some sesame oil at the end. I added some almond slices for additional crunch too.

A Vietnamese New Year's Offering...

Just a few pictures from my New Year's... (2008!) I just never posted it, for a full year now. The offerings were done simply, but the meals with family were more elaborate.

Due to some personal matter, I didn't get to do anything for New Years this year. So there wasn't any celebration or red envelopes to me! :( I can only hope that this year will get better, because I am having a rocky start already in so many ways.

Happy Lunar New Year to all!

Lunch: Spicy rice, sauteed spinach, and soupy soup

Spicy basmati-saffron rice and sauteed spinach with tofu curds.

Kabocha soup with soft tofu.

If I am to choose between a kobocha squash or a butternut squash, I'd definitely go for the former. The texture and the taste is far better than a butternut in my opinion. It is sweeter and has a 'toothy' bite to it, like a drunken noodle would have more of a 'toothy' bite than a pad thai noodle.

You can cook a kobocha squash into a savory soup, or make into a sweet dessert like Asians do. Leaving the skin on is also better, because it has lots of nutritional content. If you make a savory soup out of it, then make sure to watch it when you're cooking it. It tends to fall apart and dissolve into the broth if you cook it too long, to death.

When shopping for one, be sure to look for one that is small or medium size, but dense and heavy in feel. The ones that feel light doesn't really have a good smooth sweet taste to it, maybe because it hasn't ripen fully.

Eggplant noodles!

Spicy Indo-Chinese noodles with marsala spiced eggplant!

What's in the noodle itself: onions, scrambled tofu, lotsa garlic, turmeric, hot spices, carrots and noodles.
Eggplant: Mix of different indian spices encrusted on the eggplant, and then pan-fried.

Soft Bread Loaf

I hope you can see how soft it is, because this bread is very soft and fluffy with the extra vital wheat gluten I added to the dough. The extra kneading also helped! It was a good biceps-triceps exercise. ^_^
I have lots of sesame seeds on hand, that's why all my breads are decorated with them.

The bread was ugly before the cut... But the slices looked good after! Riiiightt?? :D

There was nothing really special about this bread, except I played around with the proportion of ingredients from the recipe I posted before.

My Very Fiiiirrrsst Cake!

This was my first cake that I ever baked! Done last June '08. It is kind of a badly decorated because this was done without any decorating tools. But I put a lot of hours in to researching how to make the cake and lots more hours into making one. However, I remember it tasting very good because of the sweet strawberries during the summer.

I can make a cake faster and easier now than before when just starting out. What I'd like to do is expand my cake baking away from just strawberry sponge cakes, even though they're my most favorite kind. That is my cake plan for 2009!

I'm thinking... coffee flavored cake, caramel cake, mocha cake, pandan cake, opera cake, blueberry cake, checkerboard cake, etc. ^-^

Oversized Dinner Rolls?

I like poofy bread! These look so funny to me. ^_^

These are whole wheat bread.

Lots of dough waiting to be baked!!

I loooove baking bread in the fall/winter. It makes the house warm and cozy, and smells great too!

Whole Wheat Raisin Bread

Soft (100%) whole wheat bread with extra plumpy raisins.

This bread had lots of flavor from the whole wheat flour, honey and raisins that I didn't even eat it with any jam or other spread. The crust of this bread stayed crispy even after a few hours.

Loved this bread for breakfast.

Lunch: Vietnamese Quiche and Buttercup Soup

Vietnamese steamed quiche with minced pork.

I made this to have with a crab and tomato noodle soup. Some people eat it with rice. Vietnamese quiche are not as heavy as American or French, filled with lots of cheese. This one was just mixed with pork, but I can also make it with mushrooms! I used to loooove putting in shrimp paste, which would make the house smell for hours! Not anymore.. ^-^

Buttercup soup with tofu and Vietnamese rice paddy herb.

The herb's flavor is really complex and hard to describe. But it adds a depth to soups, especially Vietnamese spicy and sour fish soup. You can find this herb easily in Vietnamese groceries, and even Chinese supermarkets too. Just remember to use them fresh.