The Day After Thanksgiving

Yesterday we drove up to Jen & Stefano's house in Boulder Creek for dinner. Jen made homemade turkey noodle soup and Karen whipped up a batch of jalapeno and white cheddar biscuits. Both were made from scratch and amazingly delicious. I can't stop thinking about how good it was and I could sure use a bowl right now :9 After dinner we enjoyed some hot toddies (which I didn't like) and some spiked hot chocolate with Godiva liquer (super comforting for the very chilly night) while playing Mad Libs.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today we went over to my mom's house for Thanksgiving. She made an incredible spread of food including not only turkey but CRAB! My mom let me eat some of the brains which were so decadent and lovely I almost died. We also had some veggies that my sister made, tiny deviled quail eggs with bacon, my all time favorite sticky rice, and homemade bread. We broke out a nice bottle of Sullivan wine that we had gotten in Napa during our last trip there. For dessert my sister made a cranberry pudding and my mom made cheesecake. It was all so delicious and I'm surprised that I haven't passed out yet.

While the food was being cooked we hung out..

Here's the spread:

I'm so thankful to have an awesome family, loving husband and a mom that is as much of a foodie as I am :) She cooked her ass off today and I love her for it!

Iron Chef Challenge: Battle Chicken Breast

The day after airsoft, Jen and I decided to challenge each other in a cooking competition with chicken breasts. As you know, I haven't had a lot of cooking posts lately and it's mainly because I've been practicing the recipe. I wanted to make a Thai inspired dish and I eventually settled on doing Thai Basil Chicken. It didn't seem like a very original idea and since we were going to be judged on that criteria, Justyn came up with the idea to do raviolis. Originally we boiled the ravioli in salted water but I upped the ante by frying them instead. Since the sauce I made, inspired by Top Chef Hosea, got so many rave reviews in the last Iron Chef competition, I decided to make it again. I'll post all the links to the recipes after the pics.

Yesterday we drove up to Jen & Stefano's house for the competition. We arrived early to help set up. Eventually people started arriving and we had one of the guests flip a coin to see who would cook first. Unfortunately, I was picked to go second so Jen got cracking on her dish. She and Stefano (we were allowed a sous chef), cooked a chicken breast roulade with mushrooms and broccolini. I ended up getting to taste her dish way later in the night and thought the flavors were fantastic. I'm going to ask Jen for the recipe so I can make this sometime. The chicken was juicy and the mushrooms which had a wine sauce (?), tasted so comforting and savory.

Kris took great pics of the plates.



Next up to cook was Justyn and I so into the kitchen we went to whip up our dish. I ended up making a chicken skin gremolata which had the skin deep fried and chopped into thin strips, Thai basil, green onion, cilantro and thinly sliced and seeded Thai red chilies. Justyn arranged the fried ravioli on top of the coconut orange ginger sauce and we topped that with the gremolata. We also put some blanched bok choy on the plate just to lighten the dish up a bit but I think it ended up not being necessary.



So onto the results. Karen, Kris & Prentice were our judges and I won! I'm super stoked :D Big thanks go out to the judges for giving me the win and to Jen and Stefano for hosting.

PS - We went to Ogisan for lunch before going to Jen & Stefano's house. It was mediocre at best but I took pictures of it to share. We also went to California Cafe for lunch with my family since it was my mom's birthday. It was pretty good but I'm too tired to type anymore so just enjoy the pics :)



Recipe Links
Thai Basil Chicken: http://www.thaifoodandtravel.com/recipes/baschi.html
Coconut Orange Ginger Sauce (substitute heavy cream with coconut milk): http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/sesame-crusted-tuna-with-ginger-cream
Chili Sauce: http://steamykitchen.com/5068-hainanese-chicken-rice.html

More Christmas Cards!

I think this is a better way of posting my Christmas cards rather than do them one at a time. That would take forever! So here's the next batch of cards that I made in the past few weeks.

Cards Blog Challenge: Thanksgiving Placecards

Last week I made a Thanksgiving placecard for the Cards Blog Challenge. Here's how it turned out. I did something similar to this last year but thought it came out way better this time around.