Category: Food

I have a lot of random stuff in my kitchen, and when it comes to mixing random things together, I’m good at making bad things. Welcome to my newest concoction: the mint, plain goat yogurt, mugicha (barley tea) and honey bourbon drink. It’s unnamed and currently chilling out in a cup in my sink.

So I didn’t like it too much. The honey bourbon is too sweet for my taste, even with the mugicha and yogurt. I bruised the mint leaves, but I didn’t taste any mint.

Experimentation fail.

My brother-in-law just came back from a business trip from Hawaii and brought my family some macadamia nuts and coffee. Since we still have coffee from his last trip to Hawaii (or my trip to Hawaii, not sure if it’s mine or his) along with Costco coffee I decided to make myself some coffee.

Unfortunately, I had to throw away my soy milk creamer a few weeks back because it went bad. I think it expired in January, but when I looked at it in early February, it was molding. Out it goes.

Remaining choices in the fridge were milk and kefir. Both lactose-free, so I decided to try it with the kefir. Poured kefir and honey into the cup, and then poured coffee in… I got microscopic curdles… Holy crap.

I wondered if I could filter out the curdles and get regular coffee again? Pass. Down it goes into the sink.

Since I made 2 cups. The second cup ended up with regular lactose-free creamer from the cupboard.

I baked mint chocolate chip cookies. I gave some to Laura and the Wassermans. The ants got the rest.

Ok. I didn’t throw away the ant infested cookies, but slowly eating them instead. My dad said that they weren’t attacking the cookies just yet. I think he was lying to me so I would eat them. After a year of eating expired foods, I don’t think a bunch of ants crawling over cookies is going to hurt me.

This year, I spent my New Year’s Eve over at the Papa and Mama W’s house. It’s where baby Ume was as well. They made a lot of food for not that many people. Adamu was invited as well.

Before we even went there, I had to prepare the osechi to eat on New Year’s Day. I prepared burdock root, lotus root (frozen), satoimo (frozen), dried shiitake, atsuage (which I found is called tofu cutlet in English), konnyaku, snow peas, and carrots. Adam watched me stumble around the kitchen. He really couldn’t help me as the instructions were in Japanese. I got it out from Kyou-no-Ryouri magazine.

I finished cooking at around 9:30 PM.

Mama and Papa W are always nice. Since I drove, I didn’t want to drink too much. Since Adamu drove from L.A., he didn’t drink much either. Since my mom was looking over baby, she didn’t drink much either as well. There was a lot of food to eat, too. Deep fried wontons, latkas, shrimps, crab and cheese stuffed mushrooms. At my mom’s suggestion, I brought cake from Italian Tomato, green tea tiramisu. I don’t think it had any mascapone cheese. I left them some sake for New Year’s Day.

Franklin was there and I had to make fun of his constant attention to his new smart phone. We also took turns playing Angry Birds on it. Heheh.

One thing I was surprised about was Dick Clark being on television. I had forgotten that he suffered a stroke. It sounded like he had a tough time speaking, but it was cool (and creepy) that he still wanted to host.

I think we left around 2 AM. Adamu left immediately after we got back to my place.

I didn’t go to sleep until 4 AM.

I woke up at 8:30 AM to begin cooking ozouni. I finished around 10:30. It came out good. We also ate the osechi I made the night before. My dad thought it was too light, but he likes his food salty. We also busted out the sake, too. Happy new year! Kanpai!

Last night I made gingerbread cookies. Not just any kind of gingerbread cookies, but gingerbread Xbox 360 controller cookies.

The recipe I used to make the gingerbread cookies and royal icing.

The cookie cutter was made from a strip of disposable aluminum pan, folded over twice to prevent bloody cookies. I wanted to lay white icing over all the top, but the it was too thick and I was too tired to really think things through. What I ended up doing was just dotting the thumb joysticks, directional pads, the Xbox button, and the 4 colored bottons. It looks not cute and kinda messy, but a good try.

My coworkers like them. I was only able to make 16 cookies. Fifteen went to work. Zero came home. While they may not look pretty, they were very delicious.

I’m going to make these cookies again for the holiday party up in Burbank.

The last two nights I’ve been trying to recreate a drink I saw on the Japanese TV show called 相棒 (English title: Partners). I wasn’t there to watch the beginning of it, but only the last 15 minutes where the old lady finally got the drink she came to Japan for, a drink called “Best Partners”. Her husband is English and they met in some little Japanese pub many years back. Anyway, the bartender was the murderer with the special drink being the link tying him to the murder. I don’t know how that works, but yeah.

Anyway, the drink contains gin, mint liqueur, and umeboshi (Japanese pickled plum). Um, sounds delicious to me! :9

I bought gin and creme de menthe. Umeboshi I have buttloads of at home.

Try #1

• 2 oz gin
• 1 oz creme de menthe
• 1 umeboshi

GROOOSSSSSS. That went down the drain.

Try #2

• 3 oz gin
• 1/2 oz creme de menthe
• 1 umeboshi

GROOOSSSSSS. I finished it, mostly because I already wasted 1 glass of alcohol already.

Next night…

Try #3

• 2 oz gin
• 1/4 oz creme de menthe
• 1/2 oz umeboshi paste
• 3 tbs of simple sugar (although I don’t know if it was accurate proportions as I just mixed sugar and hot water together)

Better. My dad says it tastes like medicine. :\

I also made a drink called Tequila Pink. I didn’t like it. There were also ants in my grenadine, so after I took what I needed (sans ants), I poured the rest down the drain. >_>; I also poured half of the Tequila Pink drink down the drain as well.