Eat Real Fest (Sunday)

We went to the Eat Real Fest again. Today is the last day. So sad!

Our favorite was the Senor Sisig's Filipino pork tacos ($2.50).

Looks like they're running to be in the Food Network's second season of the Great Food Truck Race.
We wanted to try the bao at Chairman Bao, but the line was just too long.

We tried the Thai Bao ($4) at Le Truc instead. It was the least favorite of the day.

Simply Garlic - Garlic Noodles ($4), Chicken Apple & Chicken Mozzerella Egg Rolls ($3)

Fat Face - Strawberry Basil Lemonade popsicle, Yellow Watermelon Pineapple popsicle ($3)
Gather Restaurant & Prather Ranch - Prather Ranch Slider ($5), Small Roasted Corn Salad ($3)
Had a sour pickle for $1.

Straus Family Creamery - Caramel Toffee Crunch ($2)

Some booths were selling fresh food like these beets. The building at Jack London Square still had the Farmer's Market today.

Eat Real Fest Butchering Contest

At the Eat Real Fest they had a butchering contest. Gigantic leg of beef into little pieces!


Look at the crowd it drew in!

Eat Real Fest (Saturday)

We've been looking forward to the Eat Real Fest all year, and it's finally here! We went last year and just loved it. It's a lot bigger this year with more food vendors and demos. Having more food vendors seem to shorten the lines a lot. The longest line we stood in was for the mini lobster roll; probably about 10 min. Otherwise, the lines were about a 5 min. wait to none. We're planning to go again tomorrow!




Seoul on Wheels - Spicy Pork Korean Taco ($3)
Get Jerked! - Jerk Fish Tacos ($4)
Jim n Nick's BBQ - Smoked Pork Sausage with Pimento Cheese ($5)
Hapa SF - Lumpia Shanghai ($3)
Pizza Politana - Eat Real Pizza ($3)
Chaac-Mool - Al Pastor Taco ($3)
Sam's Chowder House - Mini Lobster Roll ($5)
Los Cilantros - Organic Roasted Corn ($3)
They also had farm animals like little chickens and goats.

Honey Cornbread Muffins

After having cornbread muffins on the Fourth, I wanted to make them at home. I found a recipe by the Neelys of the Food Network. I hate their show (way too much PDA and corniness -- Oh! Corniness!! Haha! Get it? Cuz it's about CORNbread? Hmm...), but I LOVE their honey cornbread muffins. It came out perfectly! I used the mini cupcake/muffin mold instead of the cupcake mold that it asked for. So it ended up making 32 mini muffins. It didn't take 15 minutes to bake. It took about 9 to 10 minutes instead. It's so crispy and yummy that I've eaten six so far today and haven't had lunch! Just two cups of coffee!Aren't they cute? I don't know why my muffins puffed up like that though. Don't they look like mushrooms? I expect little elves or fairies to come out of them.

Strawberry Cupcakes

I had the urge to make strawberry cupcakes. Part of it is that it's a good way to procrastinate doing any school work. Heh heh! I used the recipe I found on Martha Stewart's website. I used Sprinkles' strawberry frosting recipe. I split the recipe in half because I didn't have enough powdered sugar, but it make the perfect amount. The fresh strawberry puree in the frosting made this lovely soft pink color with little red freckles of strawberry bits. It's sweet but you can taste the fresh strawberries.

Zuppa Toscana

I love Olive Garden's Zuppa Toscana. My brother does, too. He would experiment with the copycat recipes once in awhile and he showed me how to make it a long time back now. I still make it anytime it's soup climate. I think I finally got it right this time.

Zuppa Toscana
Serves 2-3 people

Ingredients:
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 medium onion, sliced
2 sliced thick-cut bacon (pepper-rubbed), chopped
1/2 lb. spicy Italian sausage meat
2 qt. low sodium chicken stock
1 chicken stock cube (Maggi)
2 medium potatoes, cubed
2 large leaves of kale, chopped
1 cup heavy cream (optional)

Directions:
1. In a large soup pot, heat the olive oil on medium-high. Add the garlic and onion to sauté.
2. Add the bacon and stir around.
3. Add the sausage and break it up as you cook it.
4. Once it's cooked, add the chicken stock and the cube. Bring to a boil.
5. Add the potatoes, and set the temperature back to medium high to cook the potatoes.
6. Test the potatoes' doneness. When it's done, turn the heat off, and add the kale.
7. When you're ready to eat, you can add the cream as much as you like to your bowl of soup.

Gyudon

My brother-in-law apparently loves and makes gyudon. So, Hubby asked if I had it before or know how to make it. It's weird, I don't think I ever had it. I think my mom makes butaniku no shogayaki (ginger pork) with rice. And if we eat thin-sliced beef, it's often made into beef teriyaki eaten with rice. When I looked into the recipe for gyudon, I noticed that the ingredients are similar to beef teriyaki, which I suspected, but the portions are not. I used Amy Kaneko's Let's Cook Japanese Food! again for it. The flavor was good; very subtle flavor. But the beef itself was tough. I've had bad luck buying sliced meat at this particular store before... So note to self: Buy sliced meat there only if you have to. Anyways... here's a photo of it with a side of spinach goma-ae.

Cravings

I have been craving for my mom's version of Korean kalbi. So I called up Mom for the recipe, and of course, she only gave me the ingredients for the marinade. No portions. Everything's "to taste." So, I whipped it up "to taste" and everything went well. The side dish of eggplant is from a Korean cookbook. It was alright.

I love Hubby's mabo tofu. I requested it again. Yum!!

Spring Break Cooking

So, I didn't do everything I wanted to during my break. I did do most of the laundry, tidied the office, and did the cooking. So here's what I ended up making: Grilled Salted Salmon Collar. My mom's recipe for kama on the grill.
Sunomono from Let's Cook Japanese Food! I added the wakame. I love the color of the cucumbers. They're so vibrantly green! They're the Japanese cucumbers I found at the Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley.
Pork Tonkatsu and Tokyo Negi Katsu on Skewers from Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking. Having them on skewers is for presentation only. The negi smelled so good when it was frying, and it tasted just as good.
The ingredients for my mom's potato salad. I used those colorful potatoes from the Farmers' Market. Recognize the color of the cucumbers? Those are the Japanese cucumbers again. I'm so pleased with myself that I finally used cucumbers before they went bad.
Mom's Japanese-Style Potato Salad.
Japanese-Style Squid Salad from Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking. This dish was awful! The dressing was so salty! Even as I was making it, I thought, "Man. It's going to be really salty... Well, let's see..." The squid was good, but the dressing... Oh man. We ate the squid with the red butter lettuce we got from the Farmers' Market. We ate that with Nasu no Soboro Ankake (Eggplant with Gingery Chicken Sauce) from Let's Cook Japanese Food! This was an ugly dish but the flavor was good. It's a ground chicken sauce that goes on top of the eggplant. It's ugly because there's no other color to the chicken. It's just brown ground chicken. The next time I make this, I'm going to add green onion or Thai basil and water chestnut for texture. The flavor is light. I think I'll make a batch of this and freeze it in portions to have for my bentos for work.
The ingredients for Toriniku no Misoyaki (Chicken Grilled with Miso Glaze) from Let's Cook Japanese Food!
Toriniku no Misoyaki. Oops. Got a little burnt.
Cute little balls of chicken ready to be cooked for...
Toriniku Dango no Amasu An (Chicken Meatballs with Sweet Vinegar Glaze) from Let's Cook Japanese Food! This came out so good! I'll make this again. This recipe can be used to make tsukune. The ground chicken put on a stick and grilled like the izakaya places.

Spring Break Projects

It's Spring Break! I have planned for myself many projects during vacation. I want to paint little cute things on 5" x 7" canvases, cook meals using the grill, apply for teaching jobs, write letters and overdue packages to friends, and tidy up the apartment. I got the canvases on Saturday, and we also went to the Farmers' Market. The market had those plastic Easter eggs scattered about for the egg hunt for the kids. I thought that they were for decoration, but then later realized when a parent was helping her kid "find" the egg that it was the Easter egg hunt that my husband saw advertised. Anyways, we bought short ribs there. I've been wanting to try buying the meat there for a long time. I'm always disappointed by the beef I buy at the supermarket because when I bring them home, I find that there's a funky smelling, brownish-gray discoloring on other side of the meat. Good thing I don't really eat a lot of red meat. When we do, we now get them at the butcher at Whole Foods. We've had better luck with the meat there. I love that I can ask them to show it to me and have them re-cut it to our liking. I've even seen people ask to smell the fish or meat there. I'm too shy to do that. So, going back to the Farmers' Market... We also bought a red butter lettuce for $2. It was so pretty I had to get it. It's good, but it didn't have much of a thickness like the green variety. My parakeets enjoyed it, too. We also got oranges, and a bag of different colored potatoes.

I went grocery shopping today. Want to know what I've planned for this week's dinner menu? Well, today, I made Chicken with Soy and Balsamic Dressing on a bed of sauteed cabbage. It was so good. This recipe from Harumi Kurihara's Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking is definitely a keeper. Her Pari Pari-Style Chicken; not so much. I also plan to make her Japanese-style Squid Salad using the butter lettuce with Amy Kaneko's (of Let's Cook Japanese Food!) Eggplant with Gingery Chicken Sauce. For another night, I plan to make little bite-sized pork tonkatsu and Tokyo negi on skewers using Harumi's idea. I'll serve that with my mom's Japanese-style potato salad using those colorful potatoes. I wonder how it would look with those purple potatoes! And then another night, I'll use the grill to make Kaneko's Chicken Grilled with Miso Glaze and her Chicken Meatballs with Sweet Vinegar Glaze served with corn nibblets. For the chicken meatballs, I haven't decided if I should grill them on skewers and serve the sauce on the side, or to go ahead and pan-cook it with the glaze. It depends on how ambitious I'm feeling. The last dish I have planned is the salmon collar a la Mom. Last time I made this was on the stovetop grill. So I'm looking forward to making it on our little grill. And I'll serve that with sunomono. All Japanese food.

Happy projects for me! I'll keep you updated on what out of these things mentioned I would actually get done. :)

Yay! Grill Time!!

We have all these cookbooks, but I couldn't make half the stuff in them because we didn't have a grill. Well, we have those indoor, stovetop grill, but have learned to hate it. It is hard to clean and grilling just stinks up an apartment for a week! So we finally got the little grill and FINALLY got it set up and working. We were waiting for the warm weather, right, Hubby? Hee hee. The first thing my husband made was steak. He just rubbed the Montreal grill seasoning on it, and then pounded it with his fist. It came out really good.