Christmas cookies and bread pudding

When I went to have dinner at my friend place on Friday, I bake some cookies and brought them there.
I wanted to make something Christmas like so I made these cookies with jams and creme cheese fillings.

Again, I used the book I borrowed from the library. "The Sweet Life by Kate Zuckerman"

It seems like I am making a very good use of this book. I really should consider buying this book.

Anyway, this cookie I made was called "Walnut Cream cheese sandwich cookies". Those are the white filling ones in the picture. I wanted some color also so I also used some strawberry jam for filling some of the cookies.

I have to say it was not easy for me to bake these cookies. First of all, I don't like rolling the dough. I am never good at rolling the dough out. Even with lots of flours, I always manage to stick them to the rolling pin and stuff. Though I must say that this book had good tips for rolling the dough out so I think I did it a little bit better than I normally do.

Still, I don't like rolling the dough. It took quite some time to roll out the dough and cut them into the shapes, refrigerate again for a while and bake. I was exhausted by the time it was all done. But I think it looks pretty cute.

At my friend's place, we also baked bread pudding. We used recipe from Williams Sonoma website for this. Here is the link for the recipe.

Williams Sonoma is one of my favorite store. For those who does not know Williams Sonoma, it is a store which is filled with all the kitchen equipment. I love going to the store and just look around.

They also have William Sonoma Home which is another favorite store of mine. The stuff they have there are quite expensive but I just like looking around.

Anyways, here is the photo of the bread pudding we made.

We had this warm bread pudding with some ice cream. It was delicious.

By the way, one recipe I always use from Williams Sonoma is Tiramisu recipe. This is a great recipe and I love it. Here is the link to Tiramisu recipe on Williams Sonoma website.

Every time I make this Tiramisu, I get lots of lots of compliment. I would love you to try sometimes. I am sure you would love it also!

Pakistani feast

On Friday night, one of our friend invited us over for dinner. She is from Pakistan so she made some pakistani dishes for us. I went to her place ealry so I can learn some techniques from her.

One of the things my husband really liked was this cilantro sauce. It is very simple but tasted great. I can make this at home!

The salad was also great. It was very simple salad with red onion, tomate and cilantro with limon juice but it was very refreshing and went great with some of the spicy food we had.

She loves cooking and she was very happy to have us there. She has a very busy schedule but she went out of her way for this dinner and cooked so many dishes. I really appriciate her having us over. It was great!

I was so excited to eat all the different dishes, I forgot to take pictures of some of them. For main course, we had chicken dish, Shrimp briyani, califlower dish and potate&spinach dish. There are no picture of califlower and potate spinach dish but they were also really good. I love the spicy califlower.

There was another couple with us and we were total of 5 people. We had a lot of laugh and great time. I hope we can do this again.

For dessert, I made cookies at home and brough them there and also we made bread pudding together. Both of them were delicious. I will post those pictures tomorrow.

It is so much fun to cook with your friends. I used to do that often with my friends when I was in California but I had not done that for a while. I should do this more often :-)

Anyways, the winter is definitely coming. It is very cold today. Yesterday was cold but very sunny so my husband and I went for a walk on the beach. There is a newly build hotel on our beach so we decided to have a break during our walk and had a tea. It was very nice hotel and I liked having hot tea over looking nice shining ocean.

Chicken Tikka Masala

This is a dish I made a few days ago. Chicken Tikka Masala is one of my favorite dish and I normally use a package mix to make this dish. It is super easy. This one require only chicken, yogurt, butter and water.

It required 300ml of water but it also said 2cups. I did not pay too much attention so I just added 2 cups of water. However, I soon realized that 2cups here is 500ml. I was afriad that it will be too watery so I cooked longer to reduce some of the liquid.

It turned out great.

May be I should have added some celantro or something to make it prettire but I did not have them... 

I also cooked asparagus becuase I heard asparagus is really good for your health. I like it just boiled and eat them with mayonnaise. 

I think this will also be a great healty snack! I can not stop eating these asparagus :-)