One of My Favorites!

I tell my husband each time I eat one of his homemade Chinese dishes that I had no idea Chinese food could be so good. He says the same thing to me when I make Mexican food. I guess we both agree that nothing really beats homemade food but it is also a reminder to not dismiss a certain type of food or cooking you might just be suprised at how good it is and it might even become one of your favorites.

This night Tom made pork in black bean sauce with green bell peppers, onions and for some heat two jalapenos. We serve it on top of some steamed rice. It is also one of those dishes that gets better the second day and the sauce for this dish is so delicious that I have to have just the sauce on top of some crispy rice. What's crispy rice? After you have scopped out almost all the rice from the pot (yes we do not use a rice cooker) you leave the stove on low and in 15 minutes or so you will have a toasty crispy yummy rice layer at the bottom of the pot.

Crispy rice is one of those things you might be fighting over for at the dinner table, especially since there is only a limited amount made out of each pot. I posted a picture of the crispy rice so everyone could see :-)

Cheers and Enjoy,

Lily & Tom (he's busy cooking dinner as I write this post)

When in doubt make Pasta!!

Every once in awhile when we don't have time to make a big grocery trip on the weekend and we are too busy to plan a menu for the week we get stuck trying to figure out what to make for dinner. These nights always seem to be when we make pasta.

For this meal I decided to use a marinara sauce that I bought from Costo and love (maybe it's the Italian tomatos). In some olive oil I sauteed half an onion, three cloves of sliced garlic and then browned three hot italian sausages. Once everything was browned a little I poured in the marinara sauce and just like that I had semi-homemade pasta sauce. I was about to grab the spaghetti but saw that I had capellini pasta. Someone once told me this was the same as thin spaghetti but when I put thin spaghetti into the water I realized there was definitely a difference in thickness.

Capellini pasta is like what my side of the family uses to make fideos (a pan fry, broken pasta dish with tomato sauce, and chicken broth).My suggestion is that if you are going to make it a pasta night have different types of pasta in the pantry, even though spaghetti is easy using a different pasta makes it feel like you actually planned for the meal. In the end the capellini pasta with sausage turned out well and Eloise loved it too! Leftovers were packed in her lunch box for school the next day.

Enjoy and Cheers,

Lily & Tom (he liked the dish too!)

Our First Little Collection of Pictures for the Bowl

When I started taking pictures of our dinners a few weeks ago my husband was wondering what I was going to do with these pictures. That's when I told him about my bowl idea. Now he waits for me to take the picture before he starts eating because I always try and make his plate look the best.

On the night that I made the tostadas, rice, and avocado I was about to load the picture onto my computer and realized that the camera did not have the memory card in it; a mistake which has happened a few times now. Tom suggested I recreate the dish later that evening for a picture and although it sounded silly at the time I did and since he is such an awesome husband he ate dinner twice :-)

In this little collection is also a picture of poke which is a raw tuna like salad that they make in Hawaii. If you love sashimi  and a little bit of sesame oil then you will love poke. We used the recipe from D.K.'s Sushi Chronicle of Hawaii (look at our cookbooks we love section at the side of this blog). If you have never had poke it is delicious and a good dish to make when your ahi tuna isn't the fanciest. Fun fact: Tom made seared ahi tuna the night he proposed to me! As a side dish Tom sauteed baby spinach with some onion and oyster sauce then topped it with some sliced almonds, delish!!

Later in the week it was Chinese New Year, Happy year of the Rabbit!! Tom usually cooks but since it was a busy week I made sure to make atleast two important dishes, a whole chicken and noodles for long life. I roasted the chicken and would baste it a couple times to crisp with hot chinese chile oil. The noddles I tossed with some beautiful cabbage I bought at sprouts supermarket earlier that day.

Lastly, one of our favorite meals to eat and make is chow mein. It is also the meal we tend to bring to potlucks. This time Tom decided to make it a little different and steamed the noodles and then topped it with stir fried baby bok choy and barbeque pork. I thought it turned out great!

Well hopefully all my blog posts won't be so long :-)

Enjoy and Cheers,

Lily & Tom (he became my first follower)

Our First Post!!

I thought for our first post I would share the meal we had for my 30th Birthday. However that was not the only thing we were celebrating. It was also the day we found out that we were having another baby girl. We were so excited. Tom prepared my nephew's chili recipe, homemade corn bread and pineapple upside down cake my favorite. As you will see in the pictures he added two cherries between each pinapple ring thinking that we might be having a boy. God is sure full of suprises and we wouldn't have it any other way. We love our little Susanna!!

Enjoy and Cheers,

Lily & Tom (for now he knows the blog exist)