Apple Pie Amalgam

Julian Style Apple Pie

(Original Post Date:  April 10, 2010) On Easter Sunday, we decided to take a day trip out to the historic mountain town of Julian, about 1.5 hours East of San Diego and just West of the Anza Borrego Desert.  If you haven’t heard of Julian – well, they are pretty famous for their apple pie. The [...]

Cheddar-Herb Beer Bread

Cheddar Herb Beer Bread

(Original Post Date:  April 2, 2010) A few days ago, I went to lunch at my friend Maria’s house to meet up with some old friends that I hadn’t seen for a long time… it was a blast!  When you combine great food with good friends, time just flies by, and before we knew it… [...]

Taiwanese Style Fried Chicken

Taiwanese Fried Chicken

(Original Post Date:  March 31, 2010) Whether we are talking about American Southern fried chicken, Japanese Chicken Katsu, Austrian Chicken Schnitzel, Italian Chicken Milanese (to name a few)… pretty much every country has a national recipe for “fried chicken”.  Taiwanese style fried chicken may not be as familiar to most people as Schnitzel or Katsu – but it is [...]

Chocolate Green Tea Marble Cake

Chocolate Green Tea Marble Cake

(Original Post Date:  March 23, 2010) There are several food blogs that I love to read.  On one site, I found an interesting looking recipe for Chocolate Matcha Bundt Cake. What is Matcha?  Well, it’s a very strong powdered form of green tea, traditionally used in Japanese tea ceremonies.  Prepared in that manner, it is rather bitter, [...]

Onion-Dyed Easter Eggs

Onion Dyed Easter Eggs

(Original Post Date:  March 18, 2010) Just in time for Easter… I thought I would post my favorite method for dyeing Easter Eggs without any messy food coloring or special Easter egg dye. I’ve been making Easter eggs like this since I was maybe 8 or 9 years old?  It used to be a challenge [...]

Zucchini Bread and the anti-drafting “Technical Arts”

Zucchini Bread

(Original Post Date:  March 13, 2010) What do you do when you have a stack of zucchini in the refrigerator?  Zucchini Bread, of course.  My favorite recipe for Zucchini Bread is very old… a recipe I still have from my high school home economics class.  I still remember the week we learned pumpkin bread, banana [...]

The un-Zombie Tomato: Fried Heirloom Tomatoes

Fried Heirloom Tomatoes

(Original Post Date:  March 8, 2010) So I was at Trader Joe’s the other day, and right now they have these big cartons of heirloom tomatoes (about $5 per large carton).  You know, those imperfectly shaped, oddly striped, green/yellow/red tomatoes that you only ever see in a garden, but never at the actual market?  (They [...]

Cayman Islands Copycat: Caribbean-Style Dark Rum Cake

Rum Cake

(Original Post Date:  March 4, 2010) After returning from a trip to the Caribbean, my sister-in-law and her husband gave us a Tortuga Caribbean Rum Cake, a specialty of the Cayman Islands.  It was vacuum-sealed in plastic, packed inside a hexagonal cardboard box.  How good could a vacuum packed cake really be?  We found out one [...]

Super Secret Pound Cake Recipe

Pound Cake

(Original Post Date:  March 2, 2010) I have a very specific memory from the age of 7 or 8 when my sister Carmen came over to visit and decided she was going to make a pound cake.  My parents had gone out for the evening… so we made the pound cake together.  It was fun, [...]

Orange Peel Chicken with Shitake Mushrooms

Orange Peel Chicken

(Original Post Date:  Feb 27, 2010) Who needs Chinese take-out when you can make it yourself at home?  Of course, not being Chinese, there are a bunch of typical Chinese or Taiwanese ingredients that I just don’t have in my kitchen.  But I have the next best thing… Japanese ingredients that are somewhat similar, and [...]