Cafeteria Comfort Food

Posted on January 24, 2015 by chatty

Remember the days when you got a grilled cheese sandwich with a small cup of tomato soup from your school cafetaria? Ah. Those days are not these days.

When I go to the work cafeteria for lunch, 95% of the time I get the same thing, the salad bar. 100% of the time when I get the salad bar I choose the same things, which I can tell you in order of how the show up at the bar: mixed greens, beets, cucumber slices, mushroom slices, red pepper, carrots, kalamata olives, artichoke hearts if I’m feeling sassy, then a combo or one of these proteins: turkey chunks, grilled chicken chunks or tuna. If I didn’t eat an egg that morning I might have some sliced HB egg instead. The kalamata olives and tuna have been a recent introduction. I’ve stayed away from peas, chick peas and edamame since going paleo (which I no longer am, but old habits die hard). I sprinkle over some EVOO and Balsamic Vinegar and call it a day. My salad-by-the-pound is never more than $6, even though after 1 lb (or $8, i think) they call it “max salad” as in anything over one pound is the same price as a pound.

A couple of weeks back my co-worker challenged me to create a max salad. I tried. I didn’t make it, it was more like $7.50. The cashier looked at my bowl and suggested next time I add more beets. I ate my salad and had stomach cramps for the afternoon, on account of eating too much frikkin salad. But, I digress.

Most of the days I go upstairs to eat, rather than make a beeline to the salad bar I do the tour to see what else is being served. Then I go back to the salad bar. Lately, however, I’ve been swayed. And that’s because the caf brings in a rotating station of local eateries to hawk their goods. Special guests have included Mayuri, Thai Ginger, BitterRoot, La Isla, etc. Considering the demopgrahics of our workplace it should not be a surprise that there seems to be at least one Indian and/or Asian food choice every day.

Last week as I was walking through I saw someone waking away with a bowl of noodle soup. I don’t even know what kind of soup but I saw a tea egg amongs the greens and meats and without a hesitation said to myself, “I’m getting that”. Nevermind that I didn’t need that much food. That I definitely didn’t need the noodles. The soft, yummy noodles. I got it. Beef Noodle Soup from Shanghai Shanghai:

Oh. Yeah. If you grew up in my little house with my family, THAT is comfort food right there, my friends.

Today, I entered in from the opposite door than usual, which meant the salad bar was furthest from my entrance instead of the first thing I see. Instead I noticed people walking away with pho. And what do you know, What The Pho? was there. And, yes, that is the name of the restaurant.

Sooo, I did it again. Had noodle soup, chicken and vegetable medley. Except this time I asked them to skip the noodles.

Not quite as yum as Shanghai Shanghai, but still a pretty tasty lunch.

Back to salads, though. More on why in a later post, I suppose.

Chicken stir fry with shredded cauliflower

Posted on March 31, 2014 by chatty

Here’s the key to cauliflower “rice” … don’t call it rice. These paleo hacks always disappoint me when I so just want a bowl of the real thing and can’t have it. The thing is, I will never be 100% paleo 100% of the time, and I’d rather just stick it out for a few weeks and then enjoy the real thing every now and then as opposed to pretending I’m enjoying something that is good, but clearly not rice. There I said it.
So, having said all that, here’s the recipe I cribbed for the “rice”, which henceforth I shall be calling shredded cauliflower. The real key is to season the heck out of it. Let it cook for many more minutes than you think, as cauliflower, I’ve learned this week, holds a lot of water. Let that steam out.

Now, here’s the basic instructions for how I do the stir fry (in the pic above you can see the cauliflower peeking out). This is one of the dishes I’ve been doing forever. Hard to mess up, but I have messed up before. I can’t give you exact directions, I play everything by ear, every time. There is an order of tasks I do every time, though, which I’ll go through here.
First, marinate the chicken pieces. I used coconut aminos, grated ginger, salt and garlic, and a dash of sesame oil. I let it chill for the time it take me to chop up the veggies.
Use a wok. Cook the chicken first, set aside, wipe down the wok, add more oil for the veggies. Seasoning the oil is the same: garlic and ginger.
Start with sautéing the onions. Then, add in the veggies in order by how long it takes for them to cook, so I add broccoli and carrots in early, and mushrooms last. I add in the chicken near the end, and add a little but not a lot of aminos into the wok itself. I tend to keep it light in seasoning, though. Husband often adds teriyaki sauce to his mixture, and we’re both happy.
It was weird for some reason, sitting down to this meal, without a grain in site. I honestly felt like something was missing. The stir fry over the shredded cauliflower was a good combo. It just wasn’t, you know, rice.

The chattychaw slaw

Posted on March 25, 2014 by chatty

Remember my previous confession about frugality? Well, I had one additional ingredient in the fridge which I wanted to play with, and I found the solution. We had a half of a head of cabbage from our St. Patrick’s Day dinner. Something we do not normally include in our repertoire. So, how about … A cole slaw? Better yet, an Asian slaw?
It’s no coincidence our kitchen is somewhat stocked with Asian/Chinese provisions, so here goes. The dressing can be tweaked depending on your preferences. I personally do not like heavily dressed salads. The husband laughs at me when he sees how sparingly I use condiments and dressings. It is kind of ridiculous. So, what is agreeable to me may not be to you, which is why I suggest tweaking to your tastes. You may want to add a little honey into the mix, or more aminos. Again, since I just used what was on hand, I didn’t have a complete dish. Some cilantro and scallions would have made it better.

2 cups green cabbage, shredded
12-ish slices of cucumbers, the cut into strips
1/2 c carrot matchsticks
1 tbsp almond butter
1 tbsp coconut aminos
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
Ginger root*
Sesame seeds

Combine all the veggies.
In a small bowl combine the dressing ingredients until we’ll combined. If it is too thick, add a little water to thin it out. Taste and adjust ingredients to your desire (want it spicier? More red pepper flakes. More tangy? More vinegar. Etc)
*A note about the ginger root … On a tip from NomNomPaleo I took my little knob of ginger root and froze it. Now when I need some I take it out of the freezer, peel off the skin and grate using a microplaner. Voila, the essence of the ginger, without the intensity of accidentally chomping on a matchstick or coin. So, just grate this to your taste.
Pour dressing over veggies and mix well. Sprinkle sesame seeds over and shake/mix well.

The dressing is reminiscent of a Peanut Noodle dish I side to loved to make in college. It was, more or less, spaghetti dressed in a sauce made of peanut butter, sesame oil, rice vinegar and sugar. And now it’s not such a wonder why I gained so much weight during the college years.

I’m letting it sit in the fridge overnight. In addition to the cilantro, maybe some grilled chicken for a little protein? Write that down!

A food post, San Gabriel style

Posted on March 9, 2014 by chatty

Let’s review what I ate while visiting my parents, shall we? Most of these dishes have names that, if forced at gun point, I might try to pronounce. But since I’m not being forced to, I’m not even going to name them. I’m just going to describe them, and if you are so inclined you can include in the comments (if you know the names) what these dishes are called. Only in Chinese, okay?

Hot pot .. At a Japanese restaurant. For anyone not in the know, this is where the server brings a burner to your table and the soup, veggies and meat are cooked in front of you. In some cases you put the raw meat in yourself. I can’t remember if this was the case, as I had a plate of sashimi in front of me.

Fish (including the head), vegetables, fish balls, etc

And here it is. The sashimi dinner, which the kid devoured. The fish was really fresh.

Sashimi plate … or what’s left of it

We walked around some mall in Santa Anita. It had a carousel, play area AND a Sanrio store. As you can see it was a trip meant for the kid. Including lunch at the food court. She ate a slice of cheese pizza from as Sbarro. I went to Chipotle, of all places. Chicken bowl, without most of the non paleo stuff. I did add black beans and the guacamole, but man was it not exciting.

Food Court lunch: Chipotle chicken bowl, no rice, no cheese, no sour cream. No, really.

I showed the sign to my Dad so he had to try it. He had the won ton soup. He was not impressed.

Just because.

This was breakfast, talk about comfort food. Talk about sooo non-paleo.

Hot unsweetened soy milk, mixed with salty/pickled goodness, and a bread sandwich to dip. It is fried dough sandwiched within a toasted sesame seed bread. Seriously good.

On our first night there went ate out at a Chinese restaurant, no surprise. The meal itself was what I would expect from my parents ordering … Steamed ginger chicken, honey walnut prawns, string beans, crispy chow mein noodles. To top it off, the wait staff provided this at the end of the meal. It’s the thing I remember eating at the end of big, fancy, important meals as a kid.

It’s sweet, it includes beans and some kind of mushroom or funghi.

I fully expected to eat a lot of Chinese food when visiting the parents. Definitely did that. When we got back, nothing sounded better than some Kidd Valley. Mushroom burger.

Kidd Valley – Mushroom Burger – the not-so-ideal antidote to end my weekend in SG

Nian Gao 2013

Posted on February 11, 2014 by chatty

A little celebration for the lunar new year, which happened at the end of January. My sis mentioned she was going to try to make Nian Gao, aka New years cake and that triggered the idea for me, too. It helped that for once I had the ingredients on hand. I did another baked version this year, though someday I will try the steamed version. The recipe I tried was an individual cake recipe, so I used a muffin pan. I didn’t get the brown chewy crust like it should have. They were okay, not great, possibly due to the changes in pan. Steamed next time. For reals.

For comparison here is last year’s cake.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day

Posted on December 26, 2013 by chatty

A post in 3 parts …

Hope everyone had a great holiday! This year we spent it home in Seattle. On Christmas Eve day the kid and I found ourselves still shopping. Sheesh. Once that was over there was still so much to do. I made baked eggs for lunch, leftover ham & swiss cheese to flavor. It was good and bad. No worries, just an experiment.

Next it was the dough for our cookies for Santa. In our tour of local store shopping, we purchased a couple of CHristmas books at Ravenna Third Place Books, including Gingerbread Pirates.The child was pretty insistent that we leave Santa some of our own gingerbread pirates overnight. “Make it so!” I said (not really), but indeed we did. I used Eileen’s Spice Gingerbread Men recipe from AllRecipes.com, to a tee (well, replacing the margarine with butter) and they came out really nice.

As the dough chilled, onto the next project, Christmas Eve wontons. Is this a tradition? Not really, but it could be. I wanted to do something for dinner, didn’t want to do the SC. Wanted Chinese food, but didn’t want to order takeout. Wontons is the one recipe I know from scratch, so that was that. Once the wontons were made, we rolled out the gingerbread dough and cutout some cookies. Our skull-and-crossbones cutter acted as the hat to our Gingerbread boy cutout, and voila! A gingerbread pirate. We also had a few candy canes (aka the Christmas J), snowmen, stars and elves.

Cookies cooling, back to wontons! Wow, busy day in the kitchen. I still haven’t figured out the skin – filling ratio, so we had quite a bit of filling left. (Filling: gound pork, turkey and some chopped spinach with a little ginger root and soy sauce). Solution? Some pork/turkey meatballs to add to the protein of this dish.

Kid was the “skin hander-over” (didn’t want to her touching raw meat). An excellent helper, and she tends to eat the stuff she helps with. Sometimes. Maybe I was just lucky as she devoured these. Yay! Maybe just some pre-Christmas excitement.

Dinner complete, we were ready to frost our gingerbread cookies. Rather than making frosting from scratch, this year I let Duncan Hines help me out. Thanks, Duncan!

Arrr! This was the plate we left out for Santa. Lily added a carrot for the reindeer, a small glass of milk and a letter so that it was clear to Santa that he was welcome to these delicious cookies.

Phew! Santa enjoyed the cookies quite a bit. He might have thrown a few away because they were a bit heavy on the frosting, and he’s really not into artificial frosting flavor. Maybe that happened.

Christmas morning! Was a blast. Husband got me a sweet new DSLR. I’ll have to show off its talent in another post, as yesterday’s photos were just for fun, like this one, kiddo singing with her new Singalong Microphone:

Kiddo couldn’t wait to head to her grandparent’s house (translation: more presents!). On the dinner menu: Prime Rib (yum!), Yorkshire Pudding (YUM!), green beans (still delicious) and marionberry pie with french vanilla ice cream (tasty!). Not a great pic, but the lighting conditions were not ideal. This photographer is still learning how to use her camera, too.

A long last few days with a lot of food in the house. For some reason, this morning, I couldn’t help myself, and decided to test out a pumpkin pancake recipe (see this post for my previous history with the pumpkin pancake). This time I used Chef John’s recipe on AR (I used his banana bread recipe earlier. I found it ok, though I probably shouldn’t have tweaked it). One word: Success. Woot! Kiddo ate many of them. Maybe too many of them. I was pleased with the results, too.

Next up, some more baking! It never ends. Well, it will end at the end of the year. Then I’ll be off bread & grains again. For a while. After a month of totally unnecessary treats and sweets, all good things much come to an end.

Hope you enjoyed a fun and delicious holiday.

City of Angels

Posted on December 15, 2013 by chatty

It’s 9AM on Wednesday. Why is no one hanging by the pool? Could it be that it’s, like 50 degrees?

I found myself in Los Angeles earlier this month. I say that as if it’s a surprise. In fact it wasn’t, just another business trip for work. In my new job I get to meet with publicists and such. One such meeting took place at CBS Studios. Kind of fun to see these big sound stages and all. And, like, the below:

Gal at the security gate told me to park on New York Street and this is what they meant.

Does this precinct look familiar? I’ll be on the look out for it in the future

Parallel parking was embarassing. The grips on their union break, watching me and laughing

I had a free night and made a date with my parents. They chose a place in Chinatown (just a couple of miles from my hotel, yet it still took almost 30 minutes to drive there due to crazy traffic). Ocean Seafood, on Hill Street.

In the same way some parents cook their kids their favorite meals when they return home for a visit, so my mom decided to order the Peking Duck at this restaurant. I also suggested lobster, since it was a seafood restaurant. Wow. I am one spoiled child. I’m okay with that.

Peking Duck, with a shrimp chip on top. Fancy.

I also suggested lobster, since it was a seafood restaurant. Wow. I am one spoiled child. I’m okay with that.

They even brought it out (alive) to let us take a look first. How thoughtful.

It was a quick trip, where I had spent as much time in a car as in any of my meetings, or so it seemed. I certainly racked up more mileage in my 2ish days than I have in Seattle over the past two months. I was glad to be home, where I can sleep in a familiar bed.

Although, I could have skipped this weather:

Meanwhile, back in the PNW, any icy fountain at U-Village

How’s it taste? I wouldn’t know…

Posted on February 2, 2013 by chatty

Husband had leftover brown rice from earlier this week, probably because I haven’t been eating it, so he suggested making fried rice. I found some veggies and etc in the freezer and fridge and whipped this baby up. Amazing how easy FR is when the rice is cooked and cold. I didn’t have any, on account of my no-rice/no-soy phase, but the kid had some and the husband gave a nod of approval (apparently the corn was not the greatest and there was leftover pork in the fridge that I should have added but didn’t).

House Special Fried Rice made with Brown Rice

All in all, good? Yeah, sure.

stir fry sunday

Posted on September 17, 2012 by chatty

I just got back from London. In a little bit I’ll blog about the running and eating I did over there. But first, let me tell you a story about the simplest meal ever. My dinner repertoire, not so good. Actually, it’s the routine cooking that I’m not so good at. Give me a recipe and a plan and usually I can make do. I was once a daring baker, you know. So, this one day, I decide to make dinner, and I decide to do stir fry. Only this time, I decide to use beef instead of chicken. I decide to use frozen vegetables instead of fresh. I decide to cook brown rice instead of white. Any one of these changes might be a doable change. But if you take all three, and you take ME, well you are signing yourself up for disaster, which I did. It was the first time I ever made stir fry, something I’ve been doing since birth, or at least should be in my blood, where it ended up inedible. Let me say. I was humilated. Or just quietly ashamed.

A couple of weeks ago (before London), I decided it was redemption time. I went for tofu. Fresh vegetables. And knowing this is a brown-rice mostly household, I opted for udon noodles instead of rice.

And I came out the victor. Oh, thank goodness.

Let me add, that stir fry had some mighty crisp vegetables. It’s something you can never, ever get from that frozen crap, I don’t care how preciously organic it is.

Never. Again.

We interrupt this program …

Posted on February 29, 2012 by chatty

… for some random food pics.

First, it has not gone unnoticed that the Lincoln Square Cafeteria on the 28th floor has begun “marketing” their cooks/chefs, in an effort to entice eaters. As if being the office cafeteria isn’t enough. Though, I suppose sitting in the heart of bustling downtown Bellevue, some enticement is required.

Thank you, Chef. Tasty hot and sour soup, a favorite of mine. Better than your egg drop soup, which you forced me to taste the other day.

This next one is one of my favorite dim sum dishes. I don’t know the chinese name. I’m not even sure of the american name. I call it sticky rice with pork, steamed in banana leaves. At Din Tai Fung they are elegant enough to unpeel and remove the leaves before serving. Old school is they present it to you wrapped in all its glory: