Do Re Mi

I feel sort of bad because I had these food pics for a long time but never got to creating a blog post to do them justice.  D: But I will now , so here it is!!! I created these within the last month now that my class is over and I have so much more time to get creative in the kitchen. The first dish I made was this pasta cheese bake and a bruschetta appetizer that was inspired by my favorite beauty guru, Bubzbeauty ! (^o^)  I liked her cooking video so much that I decided to attempt her dish.  Here's the video for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0NFgCYlnGA The pasta bake is extremely delicious right out of the oven when the cheese is still nice and crispy.  It lasts a very long time in the fridge too as long as you keep it in an airtight container.  Somehow my sister really enjoyed this dish; She had no idea that there were mushrooms in it and if I told her about the mushrooms, she probably would have been too closed minded to try it!  xP I...

Today's weather was crap-tastic.  It looked like mild weather outside being dry, overcast, and not windy.  But when I took two steps out there, it was so freaking freezing, I had to retreat back into the house.  I was planning on walking the dogs today but that never happened because it was too unpleasant outside. I started off my day going to this egg breakfast place with mom and sis.  I ordered the mushroom omelet and the Belgian waffle (to share). So yummy and perfect!  Waffle had a nice presentation and was good but it could have been more toasted. Now lets rewind to last week.  I finally decided to branch out from my basic tuna roll sushi and make something more interesting.  I opted for kimbap because all I would have to do was add some extra ingredients; Its base was the same shoyu tuna I usually use.  I also made cream of mushroom pasta. The kimbap was fairly easy to make.  All I had to do was add: 1. Taku...

Even though it's been getting warmer these days, I'm still inspired to cook hot stews and soups.  x3 Here's a few of the dishes I've made over the past couple of weeks.   Beef Curry This may sound silly but my inspirations for making any kind of stew comes from watching Brock cook in the show Pokemon.  I still remember watching it as a child and my earliest memories of anime characters cooking was seeing Brock cook for his friends.   Because of this, I always think about his stews when I make my own.  xP I even cut up the potatoes into more spherical shapes to achieve the anime aesthetics.   And does anyone else notice that food always looks tastier in Anime?  Their food always looks so delicious!!! Examples: Now back to my own dishes... Nikujaga I really wanted to put our portable hot pot to use so I looked up some recipes similar to oden and came across nikujaga.   It's beef and potatoes m...

My Uncle from came over to our house to visit a couple days ago so I was pretty excited to cook him some of my special dishes.  We rarely get visits from relatives, mostly because we're the displaced ones, living super far away from everyone else...  Sometimes I forget what it's like to have relatives and other family over so I get really excited to show off my hosting skills when I get the chance! One of the dishes was miso soup which he really liked and I whipped up some sushi this evening. Soooo delicious.... He really liked them and said they were "Ono" AKA yummy. :D I'll probably make him a bento box for the plane ride back.  I did that for my other Uncle who visited the last time. I think there's something really special about homemade bento boxes besides their obvious beautiful and cute appeal. It's not just food, but the time, effort, and care someone gives for someone else.  I really like making bentos because in my...

I thought I'd post an official blog just about what's going on in my life right now.  The weather has gotten really cold... more like freezing actually.  The temperatures are dropping to the 20's.. Today I was off from work so I decided to make some hot miso soup!  ( *^ v ^* )   There's nothing quite like a hot soup or stew to combat a cold house.  It's funny because my dad claims that we have a lot of food in the fridge but all that 'food' he's talking about is the leftover pizza from last night.  lol I know that in Japan, miso soup is considered more of a side dish or an appetizer but when our family makes it, it's more of a meal.  Along with the miso paste and dashi powder, I usually add: - yellow onion - tofu - wakame - daikon (sometimes) - egg (sometimes) - green onion (sometimes) ... and we eat it with a cooked mixture of brown and white rice!  The tofu adds a lot of bulk to the soup so it's quite filling.  I like to ad...

Yes in every sense of the word, I do mean that.  But in the nicest way possible. Somehow I got tangled up in making chicken katsu for my bro after another one of his 'deals'.  I went ahead and said I would make chicken katsu within the week.  True to my word, I did.  It turned out great too aside from the fact that I was in the kitchen 5 hours straight cooking AND cleaning. Here's the results: I made a double batch so that's probably the reason why I took so long...  But at least the katsu lasted more than a day! My bro also requested I make korokke which is a Japanese potato mixture shaped into flat ovals, dipped into batter and panko, and fried; it's similar to any other type of tempura except it's potato mix.  I ended up cooking the korokke the next day because I was just too exhausted from cooking the chicken katsu. The korokke turned out great too but I ran out of panko *waah* so I couldn't fry all of them.  So the first few koro...

I spent all yesterday night trying to do a system restore on my computer and after all those failures, my computer decides to reset itself to factory setting. (-___________-) Kind of annoying given that I had a ton of pictures and music saved on there but I guess shouldn't consider this such a bad thing.  I mean, I could never really feel safe shutting down my computer without wondering if it would be able to restart again (my computer had issues with restarting).  And I did get to back up a lot of pictures of my dog so it's not a total loss.  And anyway, even though I took tons, literally, thousands of pictures from trips, their main purpose was to show family when I got back and I DID get to do that. In the end, I'm surprised that I'm so calm about losing all that info on my computer.  I guess that gives me incentive to create more pictures and memories and store them in a safer place for the future. At the moment, my computer is running pretty well without a...

And yet again I wait so long to make a post, especially in the summer when I'm supposed to have all the time in the world.  (-___-);; I was really motivated these past 2 weeks so I decided to expand my cooking repertoire and learn to cook some delicious Korean dishes. After I started watching this family Korean drama called Ojakgyo Brothers (omg she's talking about dramas AGAIN?), I was inspired to try cooking some Korean dishes.  I researched and found maangchi (http://www.maangchi.com) who is really awesome because she organizes her recipes very well so it was easy for me to find a few that I would like to cook.  She also makes simple, well organized, and easy directions for how to create each of the recipes. The super-awesome-kick ass-delicious dish pictured above is called Patbingsu and like the Japanese Kakigori, it's a refreshing ice dessert, except more healthy!  I noticed the main difference in the ingredients between the Japanese and Korean versions...