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! :)