eleni’s of ny has been the leading trendsetting bakery for fashionable party favors, wedding give-aways and just memorable marketing strategic gifts! here are some trendy yummy cookies for the stylish set : designer handbags and shoes.
i spied a celine boogie bag, an hermes kelly, a ysl’s muse and a few manolos in these oven-fresh batch!
don’t mind the calories!
thanksgiving is definitely a holiday to celebrate. traditionally, every year we would go to relatives’ homes and bring our portion of potluck recipes to share. but this year, since my mom has gone home to the philippines and our relatives will be out of town - we have decided to host our own little thanksgiving dinner at home with a few friends braving my cooking and some take-out delights to serve.
with a little over a week to prepare my menu, i have been envisioning in my head the ideal feast for us. i will be honest to say that i won’t be baking any bird but i am practical enough to order ahead our ham and turkey from our favorite chinese place, daniel wong’s kitchen, who year after year makes them for almost over a hundred families who won’t have time to bake it themselves - including us!
still, i have the sides to think about and the desserts to worry about. without my mom around, i am so challenged and determined to make this thanksgiving dinner a memorable one for us! i can’t wait to share how it will turn out to be! wish me luck!
HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL!
ben and i have been craving for vietnamese sandwiches called, banh mi. there are different meat flavors that you can choose from - pork, beef, and my favorite chicken. the chicken meat is shredded and moist and every sandwich is full of pickled carrots, cilantro, jalapeno and slices of cucumber, in a warm toasty french baguette. they’re very tasty and very cheap.
we have been eating them almost every meal, except breakfast. for $ 1.50 a sandwich, you have a complete meal - vegetables, meat and starch! so even if the vietnamese parisian bakery is way out of our office, we stop by whenever we get a chance. and on our way home, we pass by another pho (vietnamese soup) place near our home that also serves these sandwiches and grab a couple for dinner. ben can even eat three of them in one sitting! and they’re even huge!
anytime you chance upon a crowded vietnamese restaurant, try their banh mi sandwiches!
believe it or not, moi here, attended a cooking class at central market and on indian cuisine at that!
first of all, central market is a one-stop shop, high-end grocery with extensive selections of fresh vegetables and hard-to-find ingredients, an impressive long aisles of wine bottles, unbelievable cheese selection, astounding varieties of fresh meat and fish and so much more. aside from that, the place is just bursting with activity from cooking classes, curb-side concerts, food festivals and rare guest appearances from food network’s popular chefs. parking space is not available until much later in the evening were most of the crowd has dispersed, it’s that hard to even maneuver the parking lot because of the busy traffic flow in and out of the grocery with people rushing with their carts.
for my attending physician’s birthday treat, we took him out to a cooking class. he’s someone who’s passionate about food - so a foodie like him would truly enjoy a rare indian cooking class like this. and boy, he did. our instructor that evening was suneeta vaswani, a well-known cooking instructor who has published numerous recipe books and a successful business woman. as she held our undivided attention, we did hands-on cooking on special end of summer popular indian recipes. my partner colleen and i, were tasked to prepare savory indian bread pudding. it’s buttermilk dipped bread layered with tomato marsala and onions seasoned with mustard seeds and chilies. it’s an unexpectedly easy dish to prepare.
dr.y with antonella and amy, we’re assigned to make tricolored bell peppers with crushed peanuts. their dish was the longest to prepare but was voted the best for the evening. other recipes made were : corn pakoras, sheilu’s pan fried yogurt chicken, smoky eggplant puree and lastly the dessert, sweet saffron yogurt cheese. all simple to prepare but as we’ve learned, patience with slow cooking is the key to indian cuisine. they value the importance of infusing all the flavor and aroma of the hundreds of spices added to a bare vegetable or meat. the mixture of textures and colors are key elements for an indian dish. their patience is eminent to achieve a victorious concocted indian meal.
in the end, the birthday boy just got his wish - to attend a fun hands-on cooking class again (we did italian cuisine last year) and to get to try all the food we made with a non-stop flow of fine pinot noir as part of what we paid for. as a party favor, we get to take home rare herbs and spices (e.g. fenugreek) and a whole bundle of green onion garlic.
if you’re interested on any of the recipes we did, pls.comment and i’ll send them your way.
for the last few days, i made use of what was in my pantry hoping to save up on stocks and supplies during the recent hurricane scare. i discovered a few neglected non-perishable items in my pantry and thought of a few twists on popular filipino dishes.
first, outside my pantry and inside my refrigerator in the vegetable bin, was a whole bunch of water spinach or kangkong. i have never done this before in the kitchen but i cooked adobong kangkong without the pork. with a few spoons of vinegar, soy sauce, bagoong (shrimp paste), onions and creatively, i used garlic flakes (i was out of garlic) to saute the leafy greens. i think i did fine. my version came out comparable to my mom’s.
for my dessert out of the pantry, i thawed out grated cassava and mixed them with condensed milk, an egg, vanilla and surprise, halo - halo mix in the bottle!. my dear friend joy thought of this add-on as i’ve ran out yet again of coconut milk and buko (young coconut) strips. it was cassava cake with beans, kaong and langka (jackfruit)! surprisingly, it turned out sweet and rustically good.
experimenting in the kitchen is not my thing, but at times of desperation, your survival instincts in the kitchen won’t fail you.