Cooking: Pork Medallions with Raisin-Ginger Sauce

As usual, I've been perusing tastespotting.com hunting down mouth-watering recipes to try. One of the food porn pics caught my eye was appetiteforchina.com's Pork Medallions with Raisin-Ginger Sauce. It doesn't need any more explaination than that. Pork is notorious for matching well with sweet fruity flavors so you really can't go wrong there.

I seasoned the pork with salt and pepper after washing and drying it.



Into the pan they went to sear on both sides at 2 minutes each. I didn't sear them for a minute more like the recipes says, since I didn't want them to overcook. Besides, they would finish in the oven for 7 minutes at 350 anyway.



I moved the pork medallions onto a foil lined baking pan that was oiled with olive oil. I set the timer to 7 minutes while I sauteed off some onions. The original recipe does not call for onions, but I like them so I added it.



I deglazed the pan with 1/2 cup each of chicken stock and apple juice, added grated ginger, raisins and salt and pepper to make the sauce. I also added some butter to add a nice shine to the sauce. I served everything with some cous cous and sauteed spinach with shallot and garlic. I overseasoned the spinach a bit, but the flavors of the pork with the sweet sauce turned out so good. Justyn said everything was delicious, but he would've seasoned the pork a little bit more. All in all, it's a good recipe. I just need more practice.



Thanks to appetiteinchina for the recipe!

http://appetiteforchina.com/recipes/pork-medallions-raisin-ginger-sauce

Justyn Cooking: Koobideh w/ Baked Onion & Cous Cous

Justyn is absolutely in love with Persian cuisine and one of the things we like to get for lunch is the koobideh at the Rose Market in Mountain View. But honestly, how hard is it to make it yourself? Granted, ground lamb is on the pricey side, so Justyn used ground beef. He mixes the ground beef with an egg, chopped parsley, onions and salt & pepper. He shapes them into sausage shapes and then broils them in the oven. His homemade (first time making this) tzatziki sauce was amazing. It's basically yogurt with chopped cucumber, onion and dill. That's it! With a meal this simple to make, it turned out amazing.

Cooking: Thai Halibut w/ Peanut Coconut Sauce

I told you all that I would try and cook more. So as promised, here it is. Every weekday I wake up, there's really nothing for me to look forward to since it's either work, work and working out, or more work. The only exception is Wednesday because that's when the local newspaper prints their Food & Wine magazine. Hurray! I'm always flipping through the newspaper to find recipes that I may want to make. Today, I found the recipe that I wanted to try. I have this obsession with Thai food so the recipe name immediately grabbed my attention. Thai Tilapia w/ Peanut Coconut Sauce.

Alright, just to see if you were paying attention, I did in fact say Tilapia. Our local grocery store, didn't have any. However, as a good fish monger (haha, Lucky does not have fish mongers, just people who sling fish) I think you should know what Tilapia can be substituted with. And just so you know, I did do my research ahead of time to see what could be but they didn't have anything that looked good except for Halibut. So Halibut it was. (Wow, that was a long run on sentence)

So I got home with my ingrediants and cooked the rice to start. I deviated from the recipe because I wanted more pop to the dish. The one on the internet, didn't look that appealing. Additionally, I like the way red bell pepper and green onion looks on a plate. I also washed the Halibut, dried it and seasoned both sides with salt and pepper.



Then I mixed the light coconut milk with the satay peanut sauce while a non-stick pan heated on medium.



When the pan was hot, I added the seasoned Halibut and seared both sides for 3 minutes each. Mm, carmelization...



After the Halibut was done, I oiled the pan a little more and put in a huuuuuge bag of spinach. They sauteed until almost wilted before I added the coconut peanut mixture. I tasted the sauce and felt it was a little on the bland side so since I had extra limes from the weekend, I squeezed half a lime and added some Srirachi sauce. Much better.



I used my new white plate (yah I'm still jazzed about it) and plated the spinach and Halibut. Then I popped on some white rice I shaped with a chawan (Japanese rice bowl). Sprinkle some green onion and diced bell pepper and you're ready to go. How's it look?



Here's the recipe: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_8311980?source=rss

Thai Fried Rice & Asian Glazed Salmon

Unfortunately I didn't get enough pictures over the weekend but here's a quick picture of what I made for dinner. Even though it's a little blurry, I think it looks pretty damn good. Oh yeah, and that's one of two of my new snazzy white plates! Food does look better against white.

Yummy Beef Stew

I love the beef stew my mom makes. It's so gelatinous from the cut of beef she uses that when I took it out of the fridge to heat up for a random weekday dinner, that it came out in one big chunk. It took a while to heat up and have it turn back into liquid form, but it was well worth the wait. Yummm.... *drool*

Happy Valentine's Day Everyone!!

Yesterday morning, I didn't expect anything. The entire week, I've been hinting to Justyn that I wanted these monkey balloons that were really cute at the grocery store. Everytime I mentioned it, he just ignored me so I dropped it. Well yesterday, I woke up to the monkey balloons in the living room and a dozen red roses (my favorite!). Awww...

For lunch, he took me to our favorite sushi joint called Hanamaru. Yes, this is the same place where I forgot the name of it for a while. I believe the owners are Korean, but I'm not sure. All I know is they make damn good sushi. We love the place because of their unconventional style. They mix Srirachi with mayonnaise and squirt this stuff over a lot of their sushi. The flavor is just phenomenal. While I didn't get pictures, we had saba, spicy tuna roll, Super Duper roll, and some weird creation with veg tempura on the bottom, spicy tuna poke, wakame salad and tobiko on top. It's like the Japanese version of pizza heh.

For dinner, he suprised me with Pizzeria Uno pizza which was frozen but the sentimental value was there. When Pizzaria Uno was still open locally, we went there for our first date. So romantic hehe. Justyn baked the pizza and also made a caesar salad boat with manchego cheese, croutons & sardines. Interesting presentation don't you think? We capped off the evening by sipping the same champagne as the one that was served during our wedding reception (Martini & Rossi Asti). I'm smitten!

Jai!

Over the weekend, Justyn and I visited my parents for Chinese New Year dinner. My mom has pictures of everything else she made, but one of my absolute favorite dishes for CNY is something called Jai. Justyn didn't care for it, but I love the stuff. AND it's vegetarian. *gasp* What happened to Steph? Am I OK? Yeah... this is the only time you'll see me enjoying vegetarian to this degree. It's got shiitake mushrooms, some weird hair like seaweed I think, tofu and clear noodles. Mmm....


Image courtesy of my Mom's blog:




Alright, on a completely different note, I haven't posted since January because to be honest.. I haven't been cooking at all. Again, my inspiration has gone. I'll definitely be cooking this weekend so I'll at least have another new post for you guys to read.