Growing up, our mom sometimes made congee (pronounced con-jee) for breakfast, except she called it mwaye (all one syllable sounding kinda like moow-eye). I think that's the Taiwanese word for it. Each person had a bowl of watery soft rice. In the center of the table, there were a variety of small dishes to eat with the rice. Most often, we had sliced green onions, Chinese pickled cucumbers (in soy sauce?), eggs (tea-smoked or fried), and pork floss (a dried, shredded pork). Sometimes we'd also have whatever leftovers we had kicking around the fridge. Although we kids were finicky eaters, we all liked this meal. So much so, that when we were in Taiwan, we would request this dish even in restaurants. This embarrassed my parents a bit since apparently it was not really restaurant food. It's the sort of thing you have at home when you're sick and you want comfort food or if you're poor and don't have a lot to eat. It's not the sort of thing you order when you're out in a fancy restaurant celebrating gathering with your extended family for the first time in years. No matter. At least it wasn't as bad as when we demanded peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

I still love congee and made it on rare occasions. Last Christmas, B's dad and his wife gave us a fancy fuzzy-logic rice cooker. I've always pooh-poohed these things but I have to admit, they make perfect rice that doesn't stick to the pot or burn on the bottom. It even has a setting for porridge so it's easier than ever to have congee for breakfast. Awesome!

So on one hungry morning, I made this for breakfast. Starting from the egg and going clockwise, I piled on: fried egg (over medium with soy sauce drizzled on it), zucchini, Chinese watercress (from my parents' garden), green beans, and dried shredded salmon. That's right, now you can get dried shredded salmon! Mom brought some back from Taiwan for me on my last trip. Underneath that whole pile of stuff, the bowl is filled with soft rice porridge.

Apparently you CAN order it in restaurants. At least, I've seen it on menus in some of the places in Chinatown. I guess I've absorbed my parents' disdain for that as a restaurant dish though since I've never ordered it. Same way as I never order fried rice since that's made from old leftover rice. (And yet I make fried rice at home to use up my own rice leftovers.)

Sorry...no recipe since I'm just using a setting on my rice cooker. I think the basic idea is something like a cup of rice and lots of water (like 9 cups of water) and cook until the rice is really soft. But there should still be water. Add hot water as needed to keep it watery. Then season it and top with whatever you like.

Made this for first time because I had 2 small jalapeño peppers in the fridge and I wanted some cornbread to eat with the Succulent Braised Pork leftovers I wanted to heat up. I ended up with a little more than 2 Tbsp of diced peppers (discarding seeds). Realized at the end of making the batter that I had only used 2 Tbsp butter, not 2 ounces (4 Tbsp). I didn't want to melt more butter and add it so I just buttered the 10-inch cast-iron skillet with almost 1 Tbsp butter and then added 2 ounces of shredded extra-sharp cheddar cheese to the batter and luckily, that worked out. I used 1 cup of canned sweet white corn since that's what I had.

Yum! Gave a little hint of heat but not really spicy (which is just about right for me) and tasted good with the pork. B liked it so much he helped himself to a big big second slice. Baked for 30 minutes at 400F in the 10-inch cast-iron skillet. Came out a little thinner than I would've liked. I would've baked it in an 8-inch skillet if I had one. Maybe I'll try baking it in a cake pan next time.

I had high expectations for this recipe since it billed itself as Succulent Braised Pork. My oven was running a little on the cool side so I left it to braise for an extra hour. (Besides, I wanted to go for a run before dinner.) I did flip it once in the middle so that the top would have a chance to be submerged in liquid too. When I took it out of the oven, the meat was indeed meltingly tender. I was able to shred the meat with just a fork. At first, B felt the meat was very bland. I had added some potatoes to the recipe and maybe they had soaked up a lot of the salt of the original recipe. I had skipped the final tasting step so once I sprinkled on a dusting of salt, he agreed that it tasted wonderful. The first time I made it, I added the optional cup of water and the sauce came out very thin, more soupy than thick sauce. Second time, I added less liquid and a little more flour and tomato paste. That seemed to help. Either way, the broth is flavorful.

With lots of carrots, mushrooms, and potatoes, it made for a nice one-pot meal. We had the leftovers as shredded pork tacos. Another night had the leftovers with Jalapeño Cornbread and roasted sweet potato wedges. Definitely keeping this recipe in our regular rotation since it's pretty easy to prepare and mostly requires patience while waiting for it to finish cooking.

I didn't follow the recipe particularly closely, instead opting to do a variation on this recipe. This led to less than stellar results.

I did start with throwing the cubed lamb pieces and bones from some lamb loin chops and the lamb shank into a pot, covering with cold water (should've at least used some kind of broth), and bringing that to a boil. Then lowered to a simmer, covered and simmered for 40 minutes to start the basis of the stock. After 40 minutes, I added two pinches of salt, about a 1/4 teaspoon of ground pepper. Laid down a layer of the chopped carrots and onion rings, and put some sweet potato chunks over that (since I didn't have any regular potatoes). I think the recipe was right...I should've waited 20-30 minutes and then added the potatoes on top. I also shouldn't have been cavalier and just mixed the potatoes into the soup. They got very very soft and mushy. I left it to simmer for another hour after the vegetables were added.

I liked the texture of the meat -- very tender and soft. Overall taste was pretty bland (which B notes is true to traditional Irish cooking). I still liked this but I think I was mostly liking the hot soup in cold winter comfort aspect of it. It's not too difficult though so I would make it again if I could remember to start it early enough. I served this over egg noodles. My boyfriend B liked it ok but didn't think it was all that memorable compared to many of the other recipes I've tried.

Got a bunch of old prescription medications kicking around your house? You can safely dispose of them at your local police station this Saturday (assuming they're participating). Before, I had been told to just flush or throw away old medications if they weren't on a small list of drugs that were handled differently. I had even been told to flush radioactive chemotherapy meds! Thankfully, I was able to turn them in during National Prescription Drug Take Back Day back in April. There's another one tomorrow. So clean out your medicine cabinets!

More details available in the link below.

National Prescription Drug Take Back Day
Oct 29, 2011 10am-2pm
http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/drug_disposal/takeback/

Many many thanks to evilbeard for leaving this comment and giving me my new favorite cookie!

I made these as Crispy Salted Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. I didn't have any toffee or butterscotch chips so I used 1 cup raisins instead. My first dozen was perfect. The cookies oozed into each other but they were thin and crispy and B scarfed down 3 of them right out of the oven. Second dozen must've been a little thicker since it did not flatten down as thin as the first batch. That might be because the dough was colder for the second dozen since I had put the dough in the fridge while the first dozen baked. Also note that if you forget to press down on each ball in step 3, the cookies don't get as thin or crispy. Still tastes good but it changes the texture. I like the thin and crispy version so much that I must remember to flatten the cookies slightly! So first batch was in oven for 14 minutes (rotated after 6 minutes) and second batch was in oven an additional 4 minutes (rotated after 7 minutes). We loved these so much that when I wanted to make a food gift, I turned to these cookies.

I had roasted some sugar pumpkins and now wanted to use my pumpkin puree. I threw this dish together after reading other pumpkin and pork chili recipes for ideas of possible ingredients to use. Quantities listed in the recipe are just guidelines. We basically started with most of the ingredients listed and then added a little more sugar, maple syrup, and lime juice until we liked how it tasted. Pretty tasty! Great way to stretch a single pound of ground pork into enough meat for several satisfying meals. This ended up being a pretty soupy chili with lots of liquid so we mixed in some cooked wild rice and it tasted great. By the last days, we had to add a little liquid when we reheated the chili. The pumpkin seems to add a bit of sweetness and a pleasing smooth texture to the chili.

I love that this is the time of year for pumpkins. Why don't groceries offer them year-round? Seems like we can get butternut and acorn squashes all winter long. Why not sugar pumpkins? Then I could have Kaddo Bourani whenever I wanted (or whenever I could wait 3 hours for dinner to be ready anyhow). I don't have any ground lamb at the moment so I haven't made that dish yet this year. But I've been roasting pumpkins and using the mashed pumpkin in other dishes. Definitely enjoying it!

So here's a post telling you how to roast a pumpkin.

Chilly morning today. Frost tinged windows and just 35F outside. ugh. Oh the plus side, this means the heat from the oven is a welcomed additional source of heat!

Took me a while to gather all the ingredients for this one and even longer to cook but it was worth it to me! After reading the comments on the recipe, I decided to add extra vegetables. My hunk of leg of lamb had a bone in it so I cut around the bone and included the bone in the stew for the cooking portion. I let the lamb pieces marinate for about an hour and then ended up cooking for a lot longer (another 1-1.5 hours?) because I wanted the meat to be melting tender and I was working on something else anyways while the stew cooked. By the time I took it off the heat, the meat slipped right off the bone with just a prod from a wooden spatula. I'm really looking forward to making this dish again. Really nice to have the leftovers on hand for an easy meal to reheat.

I liked the different smoky flavors of this pasta sauce and thought it was a nice change of pace from our usual Italian pasta sauce. Meanwhile, my boyfriend B liked this sauce but says he never tires of tomatoes with basil so I'll probably stick to our usual tomato sauce most of the time and save the ground lamb for making another household favorite, Shepherd's Pie.

I changed a bunch of the ingredients slightly to match what we had in the house. I didn't like whole wheat pasta the first time I tried it but I think its heartier, nuttier flavor would stand up well to this sauce.

I picked up this book at a cookbook exchange. What a great idea! For a $5 donation/fee, you got to drop off any old cookbooks you didn't want anymore and walk out with as many of the books and magazines that you wanted. Any books left over were to be donated to a non-profit used bookstore and coffee shop More Than Words that's run by teenagers.

Overall, this recipe was a hit and I wanted to make it again right away. It was a little difficult to roll after getting it out of the freezer because the butter was oozing from the seams and it seemed a bit messy to make. Still, the final product tasted great and my boyfriend ate 5 rolls with his dinner.

After putting the shaped dough into the muffin tins, I forgot to lightly coat tops of the dough slices with cooking spray. I don't know what affects it but the dough didn't rise evenly. Should've taken a photo. A few rose mostly evenly. Others would rise on one side but less on the other side of the roll. Maybe I needed to grease the muffin tins more. These rolls were pretty dry by the next day though so best eaten the same day. Leftover rolls probably would've tasted fine if we had eaten them with something with gravy or sauce to sop up.

Served this with Balsamic Chicken with Caramelized Onions and also with Spicy Sesame Napa Cabbage and Carrot Salad.

We love cooking with bananas but buying bananas almost always means dealing with fruit flies since I like to let them get mostly black on the outside before I use them. But now that's ok because my boyfriend makes the best fruit fly traps! For us, our fruit flies are usually all in the trap within a day or two of setting out the trap.

One night, I scanned the signs as I drove north on Route 1, heading out of Boston. I wanted to grab some take-out but nothing appealed to me. Then I saw the word 'wings' and decided to try that. Once I got inside, the menu was primarily pizza but I did see one item mentioning their "signature fall-off-the-bone wings" and ordered that to go. Wow! I didn't taste it until I had reached home almost an hour later but we were so blown away by it that I kept remembering those wings for weeks afterwards. Luckily, the menu did mention what they marinated their wings with so I could search online for similar sounding recipes. This is my attempt to recreate those wings.

If you can drive out to Angela's Coal-Fired Pizza in Saugus, then you can try the original wings. So good. And their Figaro pizza with figs, prosciutto, mozzarella, arugula, bleu cheese, and shaved parmesan was fabulous.

Brian really liked these wings a whole lot too. Still thinks it's not quite what we had from Angela's but it's close enough for me. I'm going to stop fussing with this recipe. So long as I was heating up the oven, I baked off the last of the dough for Soft Oatmeal Cookies, and then also did the Saucy Mushrooms and Roasted Zucchini with Garlic. So it was a 3-course dinner: first mushrooms, then zucchini, then wings. I guess 4 courses if you count an oatmeal cookie as dessert.

Still looking for ways to eat zucchini? This is a nice change from zucchini bread and stir-fried zucchini. I really liked this. I let it marinate for 7.5 hours and it tasted very strongly of the lemon juice. I could've used less lemon juice or maybe not marinated it for as long since it didn't taste much like zucchini by the end. But the slices still had a nice firmness to it. Really yummy. Served with some stuffed zucchini. Also snacked on the leftovers the next day. And since this recipe doesn't involve the stove, there's no need to produce heat in your kitchen in the middle of a heat wave.

For a while there, it seemed to be all the rage to post Crispy Kale photos. It sounded intriguing but I just filed it away in the Recipes To Try folder. My boyfriend doesn't care much for kale, you see. So we got spinach instead for our leafy greens. But then last summer I saw kale chips being sold for $8 for a small box and remembered that I had seen lots of posts online about making them at home. So a few more months later, I finally tried it. Yum! When I finally got around to trying the recipe, just as so many of those other food bloggers had written, my thought was "I'm sorry I waited so long to try this!" Just a very light crispy texture that melts away in your mouth. After the first batch, I learned to serve it up with each of us getting our own bowl so we didn't fight over the last bites.

Made this for my sister's family too when I visited her. Her husband hadn't eaten kale before and found he loved it. Even before we had popped it into the oven, he tried a piece of the oiled kale and liked eating it raw. I don't really like kale until it's been cooked but this seems like a great recipe for winning over people who say they don't like kale. Or maybe good for using the kale that keeps showing up in your CSA box.

For my first batch, I forgot the chipotle powder so I used salt and a few squeezes of lime juice and that enough to get us hooked. I remembered chipotle powder for the second batch and that adds good measure of heat to this snack.

The trickiest part is baking them long enough to get everything uniformly crispy but then not so long that it burns. It's a very fine line between almost-done and irredeemably burnt. Seems to be important to keep them in a single layer. It might also be helped by making the pieces more of a consistent size. Is smaller better than bigger? Not sure on that. Apparently you can make the pieces too small. My sister tried using the ready-washed and cut bags of kale at the grocery store and those burned. Maybe she could've used them if she had pulled them out of the oven sooner.

I was lucky enough to be staying with a friend at the same time that his wife's parents were visiting from India. Mona's mom was happy to let me try to help in the kitchen. I tried my best to learn what she was making but she did everything by feel so this recipe is a rough approximation. She made this upma (pronounced OOP-ma) for a very filling breakfast. My boyfriend isn't a fan of the texture, a little too similar to oatmeal and porridge for his liking. I loved this dish and could happily have it every day. She said that this is a very commonly made dish and every family had their own variations on how they make it so you can search online for other things to add.

Bostonians, if you don't mind being elbow-jostled, shouted at, and possibly grossed out by paring away the rotten parts of your fruits and vegetables, all in exchange for buying your produce at rock-bottom prices, go check out Haymarket! I sometimes hear it referred to as a farmers market but it's not. The vendors get the leftovers from wholesalers on Thursday evening and try to sell it Friday and Saturday. So do a bit of a walk-through first so you can eyeball prices and quality. Some vendors will yell at you if you handle the produce while others let you pick what you want. Fruit tends to be very ripe so buy only what you think you'll consume in a day or two. For example, despite being 10 for $1, I declined to buy plums because they were too soft for my tastes. And I looked carefully for mold in the strawberries before I picked 2 containers to buy. Still, if you're willing to put up with the hassle, you can get some amazing bargains. Here's my last haul when we stopped by at the end of the day:
- 10 bananas for $1
- 2 giant bunches of fresh basil for $2
- 2 pounds of strawberries for $1
- 3 pounds of mushrooms for $2
- 2 blocks of Wisconsin sharp cheddar cheese for $4 (about 6-8oz each)
- 3 more blocks of cheese from inside the cheese guy's store ($4, $4, and $3.50)

The cheese guy has the best prices we've found on good-quality cheeses. Not the rock bottom prices of the stands, but beats the regular prices of places like Formaggio and Whole Foods. And he offers a nice selection of different cheeses. Really nice English Stilton, some aged goudas, Prima Donna, goat cheese (even a goat blue cheese)... And the shop owner (inside) is really nice and knowledgeable too. There's a small table set up outside with various blocks of cheese. At the beginning of the day, those prices are $2.50 each, 3 for $5, 5 for $10. If you come at the end of the day, some of the cheeses will be sold out but you can buy for $2 each.

If you want to read more:
- http://www.boston-discovery-guide.com/haymarket-boston.html
- http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/442512
- http://www.yelp.com/biz/haymarket-boston

So grab a fistful of $1 bills and go check it out!

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So that explains how I came up with this dish. I was trying to think of what to do with 2 pounds of those white button mushrooms and came up with this (although searching the web for 'mushroom rice' I see that I'm far from the first person to come up with the idea). Still, it's really tasty. Tasty enough that we've had it 3 times this week already. Oh and the cheese thrown in the end is optional. I just added it because I wanted something to make it hold its shape when I formed the little rice cylinder. Scroll to the bottom of this post if you want to see more recipes for mushrooms.

gorkabear, I think this is gluten-free too if you use a broth that's gluten-free. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Heading out to the grill? I found this recipe when I was looking for a new way to make pork kabobs. I skipped the green peppers and used onions and zucchini instead. I chopped the onions into wedgees and also tossed some thick coin-shaped slices of zucchini in grapeseed oil to coat and then shook on some salt. Made skewers of pork, onion, and zucchini. Also made some with just zucchini and onions since we had more veggies than meat Soaked the skewers in water. Cooked them up on the grill outside on high heat for about 9 minutes. Meat was a bit tough but onions were great. Next time I think I'll use lower heat. I served with couscous (mixed with minced onions, garlic, golden raisins, and chopped pecans). Overall very tasty. Made this again the next night and included some fresh pineapple chunks on the skewers.

Time to trot out all the recipes I've tried that use summer ingredients. Made this one last year and liked it a lot. Brian liked that it wasn't too sweet but thought it was almost a little too buttery/fatty. And since he's not such a blueberry fan anyhow, he wasn't so keen on it (even though he did eat 2 pieces). I liked eating this for breakfast or for a mid-afternoon break with tea.

Looking online, there are versions that use just 1 stick butter or 1.25 sticks butter and still reported good results. So next time I'll reduce the amount of butter. I used heaping half cups of the blueberries in both steps since I love blueberries and we had 3 pints of them. Also, for the topping portion, I ran out of sugar. I had only enough granulated sugar to fill maybe half of the 1/4 cup measuring cup. Filled in the rest (but not all the way) and then when I was sprinkling it over the top of the batter, I sprinkled enough to cover and then held back a small portion (maybe 1/4 to 1/2 tsp?). The batter had a good amount of structure and volume to it. Also, I baked it in an oven that was a little too hot. Might've been more like 375F for 40-45 minutes total. My pan is slightly larger than the specified 13 by 9-inch pan, so the resulting height of my cake isn't as tall as it might have been.

This is a quick and easy appetizer if you use ready-made frozen puff pastry sheets. If I had any on hand, I would also sprinkle in chopped fresh basil beneath the zucchini and squash slices. I also think goat cheese would work nicely with this. I think I'll add sliced mushrooms too next time I make this.