Monday, December 29, 2014 – It’s a tradition now. Twice a year, every year, when I visit my family in California, I cook them dinner.
Remember last month when I made pork chops with grape sauce? Well, I decided to make it for my family this year, along with the salad and the grape sorbet. (Yes, there is a theme here.) And now you know why I was practicing all that cooking last month.
In the family dinner table photo, we just had a platter in the middle with all the bacon and the pork chops with the sauce in a bowl on the side, mostly because my family is Asian and didn’t want to plate everyone’s pork chop individually.
But that didn’t stop me from plating the pork chop and photographing it.
One of the changes I made this time was I didn’t add the Tbsp of brown sugar. I figured the sugar from all the grape juice and the grapes would make it sweet enough. It did come out a little on the herby side, but that’s fine for anyone who’s not me.
This is the same salad as before. Spring mix, chopped grapes, chopped walnuts, goat cheese, and homemade balsamic vinaigrette. My mother commented that every year, I make a different salad dressing, so we now have so many different kinds of vinegar. Which is not a bad thing.
The same grape sorbet. As it turns out, the grape sorbet takes more than 8 hours to freeze, but you have to pull it every 30-45 minutes to stir it to make sure it doesn’t freeze into a solid block. I need to plan this better.
Bonus #1: Wednesday, December 31, 2014 – I made the same chicken bacon sweet onion stirfry for my family friends for the New Years Eve potluck. Except Walla Walla sweet onions aren’t available in California in the winter (no surprise) and no grocery store has imported Peruvian onions. Fortunately, Safeway has an item labeled “sweet yellow onion”, which hopefully is a viable substitute. (The flavor difference would be subtle anyway.)
This one was a smashing success. The stirfry was gone in a matter of minutes, and everyone who ate it complimented me on it. But then again, it was a 16 person party, and the recipe only serves 2, so…
Bonus #2: Saturday, January 3, 2014 – One of my friends wanted to bake cookies with me. (Well actually, more than one, but…) So I decided to take the time to learn to make snickerdoodles. The key differences between this recipe and my usual chocolate chip cookie recipe (other than the lack of chocolate chips) was that I used half brown sugar, half white sugar, because I didn’t want the brown sugar to compete too much with the cinnamon. (It turned out fine as is. I guess I underestimated the potency of cinnamon.)
The other difference is that snickerdoodles are traditionally rolled in cinnamon and sugar. (I used a ratio of 3 parts sugar to 1 part cinnamon, but I also used a ratio of 3 parts cinnamon to 1 part nutmeg. You figure it out.) So the dough needs to be a little drier. So I used only 1 egg instead of 2,and I increased the flour from 280g to 320g. (I decided to use all-purpose flour, although in retrospect, I should have used bread flour for extra chewiness. Also, maybe less flour.)
Since the cookies had a bit of extra flour, they turned out a bit thicker when baked. I baked them at 400 F for 11 minutes, and they were still a bit undercooked. (Or my parent’s oven just doesn’t burn hot enough.) I’ll need to figure out the right baking temp and timing.
Cookies were still delicious though. I mean, they were piles of sugar coated in more sugar.