Sushi Play Date

The other day, I had Chilean Empanada play date with my mom friends and this time we had sushi play date with same member!

Since it is Sushi this time, I was the teacher :-)

This is how they came out.

Since it is not too easy to get sushi grade fresh fish around here, we used ingredients such as avocado, smoked salmon, cucumber, canned tuna, imitation crabs, eggs and so on.

Everybody enjoyed making sushi and I was very happy also. I think tuna salad roll was everybody's favorite.

It is not easy to watch 4 babies and cook at the same time but we also have 4 moms so some of them cooked while others watched the kids.

We rolled and ate and repeat that many times and by the time we finished rolling all the sushi, we were so full. We had lots of leftovers so everyone brought back some for their husbands.

One of them had a tool called sushi master so we used that also to make some heart shaped sushi. Aren't they cute??

This play date was actually a few weeks ago. Since then, we already had two other cooking/play date!
The next one is Venezuelan Empanada and then we made pineapple upside cake on different day. Those photos are coming up next!

I love cooking/play date! I am so happy that I found some friends whom I can enjoy cooking with!

Valentine's Day Dinner 2012

Well, It has been a while already since Valentine's day but I would like to share with you guys what we had for this year's Valentine's dinner.

Since we have a baby and he goes to bed around 8:00pm every night. It is quite difficult for us to eat out at night. So the year's Valentine's day, I made a special dinner for two.

The dinner part went quite well but the dessert was not so much of a success. Well, it tasted good.

For dinner, I made Roasted Pork Tenderloin with Apricot glaze.

Pork Tenderloin is something I always wanted to try but never really had so I thought it will be a perfect dish to make. I found this recipe on All Recipe web site. Here is the recipe from All Recipe web site.

It tasted really really good. I thought roasting pork tenderloin will be a lot of work but it was not too difficult so I know I will be making this again! This recipe is spicy and sweet. You rub pork with dried spices before and then glaze with apricot glaze and roast.

Well, actually, in the recipe, they grill the pork and then glaze. But I didn't want to grill so I just add half of the glaze and roasted in the oven. Also, the recipe called 1 table spoon of cilantro but my husband and I love cilantro so I added like one cup of cilantro. It was great!

This is how it looked before putting in the oven. Well, this picture has only a little bit of glaze but I added a lot more before putting it in the oven.

Then, this was how it looked after roasting.

For side dish, I made green chili rice and boiled broccoli.
Here is the green chili rice.

Broccoli is just boiled.

Pork tenderloin is little bit pricy but it normally has plenty in one package so we can have at least two meals out of this one packet.

Well, so for the dessert, I made chocolate dipped strawberries. This is something I made last Valentine's Day and my husband loved it so I decided to make it again this year. This year, I decided to have a prettier decoration on it but that was a mistake....

This is how it came out.

Well, it looks OK from far away but if you look at them closely. You can see that those drizzled chocolate decoration is not really a drizzle but more like dollops.

Oh well, I tried. My husband liked them anyway.

I also bought nice flower for the table.

My son was so curious about this flower. He wanted to touch it so I let him touch. In the beginning, he was touching them very gently but after a while, he started to tear them apart and start eating them so I had to take them away from him. It is amazing to see how he develop. He is very curious about different touch. And now, he is walking all by himself! I feel like he is not a baby anymore. It is great that he is growing up but at the same time it is little bit sad that he is growing up so fast. I am really enjoying every moment with him right now. Ever day, there is something new and he brings lots of joy to our life. He is a miracle!

Guy Fieri's Hong Kong Noodle

I made this dish using one of the cookbooks which I borrowed from the library the other day.
This is called Hong Kong Noodle.

The book I used for this dish was Guy Fieri's cookbook. This one.

He is a very popular chef on FoodNetwork. He won a show called "The Next Foodnetwork star" and start having his own cooking show. He also start hosting this show called "Diners, Drive-in and Dives".

His food always looked good in the show but I never actually used his recipe before so this was my first time trying his recipe. 

In this cook book, there are some dishes which was Asian inspired dish and this one called "Hong Kong Noodle" looked really good to me so I tried this one. 

It came out really good! I loved it. It took a while for me to prepare everything but the result was well worth the effort. 

You can look at this recipe from FoodNetwork's website. Click here for Guy Fieri's Hong Kong Noodle recipe. 

I followed the recipe and I guess it was for 4~6 people so when it was finished, I ended up with huge plate of Hong Kong Noodle. It was a bit too much for just two people so we ate this noodle for next few days but even as a leftover, it still tasted really good!

The chicken is marinated with ginger, garlic and stuff and it is very tasty. Plus, you can eat lots of vegetable this way.

There are some other things which I would like to try from his cookbook but I had to return the book so I cook one more thing from this book and returned the book. The other dish I made was coleslaw salad with fried wonton. This one was also really good. I will post it next time.