Author Archives: Julia

Healthy fettuccine alfredo with cauliflower sauce and sweet peas

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Julia

When I first saw the recipe for healthy fettuccine alfredo with cauliflower sauce by Pinch of Yum on Foodgawker, I immediately fell in love with the idea of making a perfectly healthy alternative to my favorite alfredo sauce. Plus, seeing this sauce immediately brought back the memories of a few years back, during Atkins diet craze, when I used to make “fake” mashed potatoes using cauliflower and how much I enjoyed it!

Making this healthy alfredo sauce has long been on my mind but what stopped me from making it was simple logistics: I would forget to buy cauliflower at the store! Finally, here we are – with several cauliflower florets in the refrigerator, I was ready to go! Continue reading →

Posted in Cauliflower, Cheese, Dinner, Parmesan, Pasta, Recipe, Sweet peas, Vegetables, Vegetarian | 15 Comments

White fish with salsa: black cod with tropical fruit

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Julia

I’ve been making a lot of tropical fruit salsa lately. You could say I am on a tropical fruit salsa kick. Fruits and veggies mixed with the lime juice and spices are so good, and there are so many possible variations – I can eat it with anything! The salsa goes especially well with seafood: I’ve made mango salsa with salmon, pineapple salsa with shrimp, and now it’s time for white fish with salsa.

In this recipe, I am entering a new fruit – cantaloupe! Who knew that cantaloupe could be a delicious addition to tropical fruit salsa! It’s sweet, it’s soft, it’s colorful! It balances perfectly with the rest of ingredients: tomatoes, pineapple, red onion, cilantro, lime juice, and spices. Continue reading →

Posted in Black cod, Cantaloupe, Dinner, Fish, Fruit, Pineapple, Recipe, Tomatoes, Vegetables | 16 Comments

Chocolate peanut butter cookies

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Julia

A while back last year, when Smitten Kitchen cookbook just came out, I won it at one of the giveaways, which made me very happy because I really wanted her book and because I usually don’t win anything. Since then, I have been using that cookbook mainly as my night time comfort reading, enjoying Deb’s stories and pictures right before I fall asleep. Then, I had a realization last week that I haven’t even cooked anything from that cookbook yet, and that was about to change when I started flipping through the pages and saw her chocolate peanut butter cookies, sandwiched together with a thick chocolate peanut butter frosting.

These cookies are so-o-o special! They will appeal equally to kids and adults, to those who like chocolate-based desserts and those who don’t. These cookies have a perfect ratio of sugar to peanut butter: they are perfectly sweet and the chocolate frosting does not overwhelm the peanut butter taste. Continue reading →

Posted in Baking, Chocolate, Cookies, Dessert, Peanut butter, Recipe | 33 Comments

Asian sesame salmon

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Julia

Salmon, salmon, salmon. How I love good quality wild fresh salmon! This salmon you see on the photos is directly from the famous Seattle seafood market, and it is SO-O-O GOOD! Especially when you turn it into an Asian sesame salmon, beautifully caramelized and a little charred:

For this dish, I made a very simple but oh-so-flavorful Asian sauce, by mixing together the sesame oil, honey, rice vinegar, soy sauce, red curry paste until honey melted and blended beautifully with other ingredients. This creates a very tasty and gooey Asian sauce that is SPICY, SWEET, and SOUR – all at the same time!

Then I broiled the fish for about 5-7 minutes to caramelize the salmon, brushing with the sauce. As the final touch, I reduced the sauce slightly on the stove top and then poured it over the fish! Very simple? Yes! Very rich in flavor? Absolutely! Serve it over quinoa, rice or your favorite veggies.

Continue reading →

Posted in Fish, Honey, Recipe, Red curry, Salmon | 15 Comments

Crepes with ricotta cheese and blueberries

Posted on May 11, 2013 by Julia

Because it was my mom who taught me how to make crepes, my dessert of choice for this Mother’s Day is dessert crepes! I love crepes! My mom used to make them for me and my twin sister almost every other weekend when we were growing up. We would usually fill them with all kinds of jam or preserves and have them for breakfast on the weekends. Those were the good old days!

Lately, I really like to fill my crepes with sweetened ricotta cheese filling and stuff them with all kinds of berries. I use agave nectar to sweeten the ricotta cheese, because agave nectar is very sweet and you only need a couple of tablespoons, and it’s easy to mix agave with ricotta cheese on low heat. I tried using regular or brown sugar and it just isn’t the same. Continue reading →

Posted in Agave Nectar, Blueberry, Breakfast, Cheese, Crepes, Dessert, Recipe, Ricotta | 24 Comments

Macaroni and cheese with bacon and caramelized onions

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Julia

Mac and cheese brings up nostalgic memories in a lot of people, as it certainly was a favorite food for a lot of us growing up. I’ve always wondered, however, whether adults remain as passionate about mac and cheese as when they were children, and for me the answer to that is YES! Except, these days I like to enhance my mac and cheese with funky additions, such as bacon and caramelized onions. Oh my yum! Don’t even get me started on how good bacon is in this dish. To go even further and make it even fancier, I often use prosciutto or pancetta in place of bacon – and that elevates this mac and cheese to another completely yummy level!

Also, I like to simplify things, just like when I was a kid, and this recipe is especially simple since I don’t use Bechamel sauce (and I did make a classic mac and cheese using Bechamel sauce once), I don’t make roux, and I also don’t use custard-based cheese sauce. I just simply mix milk, heavy cream, white Cheddar and Gruyere cheese (in just the right proportions to achieve the desired creaminess) plus spices – to make a very creamy and cheesy mac and cheese! I guess based on the cooking method I used I could call this mac and cheese – Fettuccine Alfredo, too!

Adding caramelized onions certainly makes this more of an adult mac and cheese, and what a delicious addition it is! Just make sure to caramelize onions for 30 minutes to make sure they brown thoroughly, without burning. In the end, you should have onions that are soft and sweet from all the caramelization process. Continue reading →

Posted in Bacon, Cheddar cheese, Cheese, Pasta, Recipe | 28 Comments

Southwestern shrimp with pineapple salsa

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Julia

Yes, I have a lot of fresh pineapple at my disposal right now. Thus, this is the second time this week I am making a recipe using pineapple – and I don’t mind it in the least! I love fresh pineapple!!! I could snack on plain pineapple all day long, but I also like to use it as an ingredient to enhance recipes, such as making this pineapple salsa to accompany fish or shrimp.

I love southwestern flavors and I love seafood – the two concepts I combine in this simple dish. The shrimp is coated in southwestern spices: cumin, oregano, chili powder, paprika, garlic, plus salt and pepper. It is cooked on the stove top on high heat for a short time – I don’t want to overcook the shrimp! It can also be grilled, but this is a weeknight dish for me, so I don’t have time for the grill.

The pineapple salsa is simply delicious! Fresh and bright in color, it’s full of anti-oxidants, fiber, and other nutrients. I have a hard time staying away from it, so usually very little of this salsa makes it to the actual dinner table, and I simply have to make a double batch. You might have to double the salsa recipe – it’s too addicting! Continue reading →

Posted in Black beans, Fish, Fruit, Pineapple, Recipe, Shrimp, Tomatoes, Vegetables, Vegetarian | 17 Comments

Peanut butter surprise cookies with rolos

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Julia

These peanut butter cookies stuffed with Rolos and rolled in sugar belong in the hall of the best peanut butter cookies ever! I highly recommend these – they are definitely the best peanut butter cookies I have tried so far, especially considering how easy they are to make! The cookie itself (even without the rolos) is so perfect with its yummy brownie-like texture: it’s both chewy and soft at the same time. There is just the right amount of peanut butter: not too much and not too little. You can definitely taste a peanut butter in this cookie, and yet it’s not like you’re eating overly rich peanut butter cookies. Topped with utterly delicious milk chocolate caramel candy (Rolos), these cookies reach a completely new level! And when you bite into the chocolate center, and it burst with chewy caramel – it’s then that you realize that these cookies completely justify their name: peanut butter SURPRISE cookies (with rolos).

The seemingly unimportant step of rolling these cookies in granulated sugar right before putting them in the oven is the reason why these cookies look so pretty (almost like sugar cookies), why they are light in color and have beautiful cracks on top. Coating these cookies in sugar before baking serves two purposes:

1) The cookies acquire lighter, much more attractive color when sugar coated. If you don’t roll these cookies in sugar, they will come out much darker, almost looking like dark peanut butter. Rolled in sugar, they come out looking like sugar cookies!

2) Rolling cookies in sugar gives them a nice soft crunch on the outside of the cookie. Continue reading →

Posted in Baking, Cookies, Peanut butter, Recipe, Rolos | 19 Comments

Broiled salmon with mango salsa and rice

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Julia

Right now, April-May, is the best time to buy fresh mangoes and pineapple – a self-imposed mission my husband has successfully accomplished for the past 3 weeks. I now always have a fresh pineapple (or two, or even three!) on my counter, and a couple of mangoes sitting in the refrigerator or ripening quietly in the pantry. Velvety fleshed and tasting like honey, mangoes are especially my current favorite! I only like to use them raw as mangoes seem to lose their flavor if cooked.

So, with the abundance of mangoes and pineapples at the market (and the abundance of salmon in my freezer), it was only a matter of time before I made a dinner combining broiled salmon with mango salsa. Continue reading →

Posted in Fish, Fruit, Mangoes, Pineapple, Recipe, Rice, Salmon, Tomatoes, Vegetables | 21 Comments

Strawberry banana bread with blueberries

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Julia

Whenever I make banana bread, it’s usually because I have overly ripe bananas that are about to rot but I don’t want to waste them. You should’ve seen these 3 bananas that went into this bread: they were black and already mushy inside their banana casing. My mother-in-law cringed when she once saw me save bananas that were this ripe. This time around, I also had a package of fresh strawberries that were getting dangerously soft and a package of wrinkled fresh blueberries, so why not throw all of these soft, wrinkly, mushy ingredients together into one deliciously moist strawberry banana bread!

And what a great and colorful banana bread it turned out to be! I also added a tablespoon of fresh lemon zest to the bread batter which gave the bread even more oomph! It’s like the summer entered my house! Mixed berries, spiced up by the lemon zest in a banana bread – to me, it tastes like a summer berry cake. You can’t really go wrong with a very moist banana bread stuffed with strawberries and blueberries. Continue reading →