Iron Chef Randy

Each one of us has something to boast about our father, mother, or even our partner. For many married women, they would say things they like about their husbands such as being thoughtful, caring, understanding, intelligent and the likes. I'm not saying that my husband doesn't possess any of those. It's just that I think the best quality that my husband has is very much different from most men possess. He loves cooking ("loves" actually I think is an understatement) and he cooks well based on my fair judgment.

In our household, Randy (the husband) does the cooking, most if not all the time. Since I travel every week, Thursday/Wednesday nights (the night I'm coming from travels) have become special dinner night. My husband has this habit of preparing a special dinner for us knowing that I'd be dead tired by the time I reach home. He actually doesn't like me being on a first class flight because that means I'd be eating my dinner in the plane. But what I do sometimes is I skip the dinner in the plane just to have an empty stomach and enjoy what he had prepared for us at home.

But lately, he's been running out of options as to what to cook. We got tired of eating the same dish each day. So in one good day, when we were at Costco, I spotted a cook book that has recipes from all over the world, with pictures and all. Whenever I cook, I usually just google something for the recipe and I have been wanting to have either a recipe book or a container/notebook where I can keep/jot down recipes I get from the internet. So when I found this book and after looking at the tag price (it was just $5.99!), I immediately decided that I should buy the book. I have mentioned that it has pictures of each and every dish - which helps us a lot in deciding what we have a taste for for a given day.

Of course, the husband didn't argue in buying the book. He knows that he'll really be benefited by the book. So, I tried taking pictures of what we/he have/has been cooking. I helped in some dishes whenever I'm home and not travelling. But all credits should go to "Chef Randy":


This was our first trial of cooking out of the ordinary. Most americans prefer eating burgers for lunch or dinner. So we tried cooking a home-made burger! I did the 'pisil-pisil' to shape it like a true burger...hehe! :P The recipe for this actually didn't come from the book as we made this even before we discovered the book.

In the following pictures, I will be posting the dishes we've tried from China section of the book. Brace yourself... the following texts/pictures are not recommended to those who are trying to lose weight. :P


And here are the ingredients! The ingredients are somewhat simple -- just whatever was available in our stash.


...and the finished product! Our buns were small. But one bun was more than enough to fill our empty stomach! T'was soooo heavy. Yum! Yum! (We added American cheddar cheese and yes, we forgot some lettuce and pickles).


Beef with mushroom & broccoli from China.


Braised vegetable from China. I very much liked the straw mushroom! :)


Sweet & Sour Pork from China.

And here's the culprit of all these:


The front cover. You'll see that there are post-its stuck in the pages. We actually tag those that we want to try. :)


Sample page of a recipe (Chicken Biryani - we've tried this too!). It has a listing of all the ingredients (swear! some ingredients are never-heard and hard to find!) and step-by-step procedures with pictures and a final product picture. Convenient, isn't it?


And this is how the recipes are laid out. By cuisine.

And these are the cuisines available in the book:
Africa, China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Middle East, Morocco, Italy, Spain, France, North America, Cajun & Creole, Caribbean, and Mexico.

We have also tried some from Thailand, India and Spain. Maybe I'll save those for my next entry! Bon appetit! :)

Fisherman's Wharf

Wharf, originally uploaded by randy+lei.

Taken @ Fisherman's Wharf
San Francisco, CA
December 2009

Sunny Saturday

Peeking from our bedroom, it's so nice to see the strong rays coming from the sun! Oooohhh. I love the heat. I love the sun. I can't wait for spring/summer. But I'm pretty sure that the sun is deceiving me again. It looks hot and warm outside looking from the inside of your apartment, but once you step your foot even just an inch out from your doorstep, there's no doubt that it would immediately transform to a frozen foot. It doesn't sound right in this early morning. Eeeek.

We woke up late today. We woke up @ around 9am (yes, that's late) and just got up @ 10am. We slept kinda (like "yah know") late last night...errr, mornight. I hurried to bed @ around 3:15am. Why that late? I have a list of reasons:

(1) We were supposed to go to Dominican University to pick up "something" yesterday (Friday). At 4pm, when I was about to take a bath, I screamed inside the bathroom. You see, I have this habit of putting on the hot water at its maximum before I adjust it to the bearable temp. I was waiting...waiting...waiting...for it to be burning hot (I looooveee hot bath!). But it seemed like it was taking ages for the dearly hot water to come out. So I said, maybe I just feel cold that's why I can't feel the warmth of the water. So, I turned on the heater inside the bathroom (ok..ok...I'm not being eco-friendly here. Sorry, Comed). After a few more minutes of waiting, I still waited in vain. Sigh. So yeah, you know what came next. Aside from my very predictable argument with the leasing center, it ended up "me not taking a bath". yikes! I swear, this is the first time that I came out of our apartment without taking a shower. That actually didn't sound so bad because good thing, I was able to shower the night before. So, because of this, we were just able to get out of our apartment at around 5:30 pm and headed to Riverforest.

(2) After getting my "something" from Riverforest, we ate, stopped @ Borders (to stock up again on books. I already finished the book I bought last week. So I bought 2 books this time), stopped @ Redbox to rent (2) DVDs, went to Randy's friend to pick up something. It was already 9pm when we reached home.

(3) At home, we did some home stuff and had my elusive hot bath (Yey, the hot water came back by the time we got home!). Time check - it was 12:00am. And because we rented 2 DVDs, we had to watch at least 1 so that our dollar wouldn't go to waste. So, we watched the first DVD - "Julie & Julia". My verdict of the movie: I did not like it. Maybe 2 out of 5? (Is this an appropriate description when I fell asleep in the middle of the movie? Well, I just missed the 20-min run of the movie). There's no twist and the ending is so predictable. I love Meryl Streep but the plot just doesn't fascinate me. And it's not even "OK" for me...I really did not like it. (You know when sometimes people just say - "Ok lang"... I even didn't have that "pampalubag loob" reaction).

So, that's it. That is how my Friday/Saturday early morning went. There are a lot of activities lined up for today. I just hope I could finish all of them. Have a nice Saturday, everyone! :)