Veggie Fritatta

Mmm we've been on a veggie kick in my apartment this week, so here's my contribution to the the healthiness.

Ingredients

• 2 T olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 yellow onion, diced
• 1/2 c mushrooms, sliced
• 1 red bell pepper, diced
• 1/2 zucchini, diced
• 1/4 c eggplant, diced
• 1/4 c parmesan cheese, shredded
• 6 eggs
• 1 stalk green onion, sliced (only white part)
• salt and pepper

Directions

1. Heat olive oil in large pan and saute garlic till fragrant
2. Add in onion and saute till soft, put aside garlic and onion
3. In the same pan, saute mushrooms till soft and shrunk to about half the size, put aside mushrooms
4. Saute bell pepper, zucchini and eggplant until just soft.
5. Beat 6 eggs until combined, add green onion, salt and pepper to taste. Combine cooked vegetables, parmesan cheese, and beaten eggs in a 8x8 baking dish.
6. Bake frittata at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Broil for another 3 minutes at end.

Feta Green Onion Waffles

Well I was looking at this recipe for cheddar onion biscuits and they just looked so darn good. Scrambling around my kitchen I found myself some feta cheese and green onions and bisquick, perfect for a savory snack. These were so good, I made myself another batch this morning.

Ingredients

• 1 egg
• 1/4 c Feta Cheese
• 1 c Bisquick Mix
• 1/2 c milk
• 1 t vegetable oil
• 1 green onion chopped
• 1/4 t salt
• 1/2 t freshly ground pepper

Instructions

1. Preheat waffle iron.
2. In a mixing bowl, beat the egg,and then add all other ingredients. Mix until well combined.
3. Place mix on waffle iron, should make about 2 waffles. Cook 1 minute longer than normal waffles on your iron.

Feel free to top with some more feta cheese crumbles.

Spam Misubi

• nom nom nom nom. i actually don't like spam. but i do like anything even closely related to sushi. and i guess my love of sushi is greater than my dislike of spam.

okay i'm going to make up for the lack of directions with just a whole lotta pictures.

Ingredients

1. 1 cup uncooked jasmine rice
2. 1 T sushi vinegar
3. 1 can spam (I think I used a 8 oz can)
4. 1 T soy sauce
5. 1 T oyster sauce
6. 1 T white sugar
7. 10 seasoned dried snack seaweed pieces

Instructions

1. Make your rice, preferably in a rice cooker, otherwise equal parts water and rice in the pot. When your rice is finished, add the vinegar and stir well, then place in fridge to cool.
2. Cut up spam on the side into ~5 slices
3. Mix soy sauce, oyster sauce and sugar, and coat spam in the mixture.
4. Fry spam for about 5 minutes on each side until golden.
5. Pack rice into your spam can, nice and tight. Put a spam piece on top, then lay a seaweed piece over the spam and flip over. You might have to hit the can a couple of times to get everything out. Add the second piece of seaweed on the rice side, and use some water to stick the two seaweed pieces together on their overlap.
6. Repeat. And then eat :D

Spinach Orzo Salad

I went to a potluck on Saturday that I was not aware of until late friday night...so had to make something quick and easy and would feed a good amount of people. I also had to get my car setup for gettaround (sign up if you're at ucsd) so I was carless and making food at Alex and Elliot's place. Interesting because I didn't know where any of their bowls were, or their utensils/ they are not exactly the cleanest boys so everything was in the sink or sitting on the table etc...

But this is a dead simple recipe which you can do for under $8 to feed like 8 people even under dire circumstances.

Taken from all recipes with a few minor changes. http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/spinach-and-orzo-salad/Detail.aspx

Ingredients

• 1 (16 oz) package uncooked orzo pasta
• 1 (10 oz) package baby spinach leaves, finely chopped
• 1 large cucumber, diced
• 1 1/2 cup cherry tomatoes, quartered
• 1/2 pound crumbled feta cheese (optionally with mediterranean spices, found some at Trader Joes)
• 1/2 teaspoon dried basil
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

Directions

1. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add orzo and cook 8-10 minutes or until al dente; drain and rinse with cold water.
2. Transfer to a large bowl and stir in spinach, feta, cucumber, tomato, basil, thyme, and oregano. Toss with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Refrigerate and serve cold.

I ended up leaving half of this salad with the boys and some for the mechanic working on my car. It makes a lot :D

Mish-mash

Okay, so I'm getting lazy and definitely not-writing-detailed-recipes anymore.

BUT THAT'S OKAY because it (hopefully) means more regular entries (with pictures!) instead of long, empty months of abandonment.

Lemon-thyme Yogurt Cake

The lemon cake base was very tasty, but the addition of thyme, though interesting, made it a little too savory for my taste.  A friend commented that it reminded her of cornbread (texture-wise it was still quite cake-y).
A special point: it has olive oil and Greek yogurt!
Lemon-thyme recipe.  Original lemon yogurt cake recipe.

Marshmallow Cake

This no-bake cheesecake (the true nature of this deliciously fluffy concoction) is a recipe I had bookmarked for about 4-5 years before finally trying it~~  Originally found it on AllRecipes while looking for a way to use up marshmallows.

Spinach-Cheese Swirls

For these, I vaguely followed this recipe, found on the inside of the Pepperidge Farms Puff Pastry Sheets package.
My significant changes include: using fresh, instead of frozen, spinach (not a great idea, it got messy and weird, though taste-wise it was fine); using whatever cheese I had in the fridge; adding sun-dried tomatoes (delicious~).

Cold Osmanthus Honey Dessert

 Okay, I'll post a recipe for this one because, a) it's really easy, and b) the original one is in Chinese (somehow I got it right!...I think).
I made this because I really wanted Osmanthus Jelly (桂花糕) but I could only find osmanthus sauce, and no dried osmanthus flowers (have since found/bought the flowers, will make some proper gui hua gao sometime soon).
Note: it's very very sweet (well duh, 1/4 cup honey?), probably accentuated by the osmanthus sauce's high sugar content.  Were I to make this again, I would switch the sauce out for flowers, compensating for this by: infusing flowers in 1/4 c. hot water while making gelatin/water mixture with only 1/2 c. water.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 tbsp gelatin (um...I guesstimated this into 1 tbsp.  maybe. don't quite remember.  Also, now that I'm re-reading the recipe, it seems you're supposed to use tapioca flour...oops.)
• 3/4 c. water
• 1 tbsp. Osmanthus Sauce (桂花醬)
• 1/4 c. honey

Steps:

1. Add the gelatin (or tapioca flour, haha) to the water, slowly heat until it dissolves completely.
2. Add osmanthus sauce to hot gelatin and water mixture, heat to a low boil.
3. Remove from heat (remembering to turn off the heat, too), add honey, stir until well mixed, then pour into flat bottomed pan*.
4. Place pan in refrigerator.  Once contents have cooled and completely congealed, remove from refrigerator and cut out cute, bite-size shapes to serve (and eat!).

*I didn't do this part right, haha (you can tell from the photo..?)!  Instead of following instructions (because I didn't understand them before, I suppose..), I poured the mixture into little silicon molds, let it cool in the fridge, then ate them out of the molds (because it seemed too difficult to pop them out).  Turns out that only the top layer exposed to air is stubbornly sticky, once you cut through that part, the rest comes out fairly easily.

*J2Special!* La Jolla Living~

Coronado Island, not-actually-an-island, a little south of La Jolla

So back in May....at the very beginning of summer (for semester folk at least, haha..)....I (Jo) visited UCSD! :D
And of course, because people do not live on bread alone, there was cooking!  Together again ♥

Jerk-flavored chicken thighs, Jeanne's awesome stir-fried snap peas, white rice

Recipe for the chicken was partly taken off the bottle of jerk-sauce and partly improvised--basically we put the thighs in a pyrex dish with one onion (sliced), covered the whole thing with the sauce, and baked it (at 375°F?) for 30-40 minutes, turning the thighs over once.  Easy&delicious.
I'm not sure exactly how Jeanne stir-fried the snap peas, but they tasted wonderful.

♥dulce de leche cheesecake♥

For the (no-bake!) cheesecake, we bought dulce de leche in a can (by nestle!) and used the recipe printed on the label.
Yummmmy, but very, very rich.  Ummm...I don't think we finished it.

Hopefully more updates soon...before I leave for Japan!

~*~*~* Passion-Orange Sparkling Drink *~*~*~

In celebration of warmer weather, pre/post-finals relaxation, and overall refreshment, here's a sparkling juice drink "recipe" (I like to think of it more as, "guidelines").

Serving size: 1 glass (but easily adjustable!)

Ingredients:
-1 orange, room-temperature
-passion fruit syrup
-cold carbonated water (Calistoga, San Pellegrino, club soda, etc.)
-ice (optional, but definitely nice if you have it)

Method:

1. Juice the orange.  Be impressed by how little juice is contained in that entire orange.
2. Pour carbonated water into a glass until 2/3 - 3/4 full (this depends on how large your glass is).
3. Pour in your fresh-squeezed orange juice.  Be amused by how it fizzes.
4. Add in a couple spoonfuls of passion fruit syrup.  Stir a few times, to make sure everything's nicely mixed.  Taste, then adjust sweetness and passion fruit flavor by adding a little more at a time until desired sweetness/passion is reached.

Notes:
-If you want to make A LOT of this, it's probably most practical to just buy some (not from concentrate) orange juice.
-The proportion of carbonated water to juice is approximately 3:1.  That means the final drink is 75% fizzy water, 25% OJ.  If you're inaccurate like me, err on the side of more juice, less water.
-The reason temperature is specified for the orange and carbonated water (under ingredients) is...science-y!  Sort of.  I remember reading somewhere that you get the more juice out of citrus fruits when they are at room temperature than when they are cold from the fridge (there's some scientific reason, I can't articulate it).  For the carbonated water, it comes down to gas laws: the colder it is, the more gas will dissolve into the liquid (something to do with molecular motion, I think...hey, chem was a long time ago..).  The converse is also true: the warmer it is, the less gas will be dissolved in the liquid.  This is why soda is so much more awesome cold.  Essentially, for maximum fizziness, refrigerate carbonated beverages.
-I got the idea for this combo from a can of juice concentrate, haha...
-Orange juice + Sprite/7-up is also a most excellent combo. :3