Last Thanksgiving Morgan was introduced to my aunt’s "sticky rice" and it was love at first bite! Since then we’ve been pestering her for the recipe but to no avail. So instead of waiting for Thanksgiving to roll around this year we decided to do a little online research and replicate the dish the best we could. After several tries this is how we’ve faired.

Ingredients

• 3 cups sweet rice (rice cups not measuring cups)
• 6-8 dried shiitake mushrooms (sliced)
• small handful dried baby shrimp
• 4 Chinese sausages
• 1/2 yellow or white onion
• 2 stalks green onions
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 2 tsps. soy sauce
• 1 tbls. oyster sauce

The very first thing you want to do is soak the rice in cold water overnight or for at least four hours. Rehydrate the dried shiitake mushrooms and shrimp in separate bowls filled with cold water for about 30 minutes. While they are soaking dice the onion, green onions and Chinese sausage. For the Chinese sausage I first quartered them lengthwise then chopped into smaller pieces. After the shiitake has rehydrated remove from water (but reserve the liquid) and chop finely. Also scoop out the baby shrimp and toss the soaking water.

Heat a small skillet or wok on medium-high heat. Combine the sausage, onions, shrimp and mushrooms and saute until the onions turn translucent (about 5 minutes). Add the soy sauce and oyster sauce, mix then remove from heat.

Drain the rice and transfer to the rice cooker pot if you didn’t already use it for soaking. Add the chicken broth to the rice then use the reserve liquid from the mushrooms to fill the pot up to line 3 (since we’re cooking 3 cups of rice). The picture above has some sliced shiitake on top but this is totally unnecessary. Next add the sauteed mixture on top of the rice. Do not mix.

Close the lid of the rice cooker and set to cook. We have a snazzy Zojirushi rice cooker that has a specific setting for "mixed rice" but if you don’t have that you can steam the rice for about 30 minutes or until all the broth has been absorbed. When done, open the lid and using the rice scoop gently fold/mix the ingredients together.

Makes 6-8 servings

My cute husband got me a stash of Domoooo! Attack which we decided to try over the 4th of July weekend. Tasty. Tart like Red Bull but without the jitters.

Oh chocolate mousse, how I love thee.

Actually, let me amend that statement. Oh chocolate, how I love thee.

Here’s one truth about me: I love chocolate. It doesn’t matter what it’s in, I love it.

My latest craving is craving chocolate mousse.

I’m always hunting for the best and tastiest chocolate recipe and both Alice and I were happy with the way this one. For this version, I tweaked a Tyler Florence recipe to make a double serving (because if I’d made the full batch, I would have eaten three servings, and I didn’t need that post-eating guilt).

Check out the recipe!

Chocolate Mousse:

• 3 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped (or chips)
• 1.5 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1.5 large eggs, separated (it’s a little tricky, but not impossible)
• 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
• 1/8 cup plus a pinch of sugar
• 1/4 cup heavy cream, cold
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• Pinch of salt
• Whipped cream for garnish

First, melt the chocolate and the butter together — I used the microwave. If you want to be proper and use a double boiler, it’s easy; I just usually don’t have the patience to wait for that. The main advice for all of your microwave users is to make sure not to burn the chocolate. I’ve heard this is easy to do, so just watch closely.

Once the chocolate has cooled some, mix in the egg yolks and a pinch of salt. Be careful not to mix in the yolks too quickly or you’ll get scrambled eggs in chocolate. I tempered my yolks (adding a bit of the chocolate to the yolks to bring them up to temp before adding them to all of the chocolate), but if the chocolate/butter mix is cool enough, you should be fine. As for the salt, it brings out more of the flavor (don’t worry, salt in desserts make the flavors more pronounced and yummy!).

Next, whip together the egg whites and the cream of tarter (cream of tarter will help stabilize the egg whites). This is where you add in the 1/8 cup of sugar. Go to taste with this one. I added less than 1/8 cup, because I thought the recipe would be too sweet with the full amount, but if you like a little sweeter, go with the full 1/8 cup.

It’s now time to whip the heavy cream. This is where you add a pinch of sugar and vanilla. I used a very small pinch of sugar, but like with the egg whites, if you like your mousse a little sweeter, add more. Those black flecks in the picture are from the vanilla — I use vanilla bean paste that has seeds in it (I like the extra flavor they bring to the party).

Finally, it’s time to bring them all together. First, fold in the egg whites and then the whipped cream. Be gentle! Don’t think that you need to get one huge homogenous mix — if you have streaks of white in there, that’s perfectly ok. You don’t want to lose all of the lightness that you beat into the egg whites and cream.

Finally, chill and serve garnished with a little whipped cream!

This week I had a hankering for polenta, so I added it to our menu (yeah, I typically write out a weekly menu for us, I’m a bit of a nerd).

Rather than just plain ol’ polenta (which is tasty, don’t get me wrong), I wanted to add something with a little sauce on it, which immediately made me think of a ragout.

Knowing that Alice is a big mushroom fan, I decided to go with a mushroom ragout and viola, our Wednesday night dinner: polenta with sausage and mushroom ragout.

Sadly, I used some wine in making the ragout, but it wasn’t the whole bottle. That meant Alice and I had to drink the rest of it.

Real shame that.

A while back, Alice and I had some leftover rice, so we decided to make fried rice (with the possible exception of rice pudding, there are few better uses for leftover rice). Typically, we use ham or some other pork product as the protein; but this fateful day, we didn’t have any and were too — let’s say unmotivated — to go to the store.

However, we did have bacon. Hello inspiration.

Adding the bacon added a nice smoky note to the fried rice and kept us happy with its porky goodness. Seriously, is there anything that bacon can’t do?

Unlock the keys to discovery for Bacon Fried Rice!

Bacon Fried Rice:

• some bacon (we usually use about three strips)
• leftover rice (as much as you think you want, we usually have about 3ish cups)
• 2 green onions sliced
• 2 cloves of garlic diced
• 1/2 a head of cabbage sliced
• 2 eggs
• soy sauce
• salt

First things fry the bacon in your cooking vessel (we use a wok). Make sure to crisp it up, we’ll be folding it in later and it won’t get any crunchier than it is now.

Next, remove the bacon and discard some of the grease, reserving about 2 tablespoons.

Add the garlic and green onions (save some green onions for the garnish) to flavor the oil.

Next, add the cabbage and salt it. Salting the cabbage will help remove the water content and let it wilt and cook quicker.

Once that’s wilted and cooked down a bit, add the rice and a splash of soy sauce to taste. Mix it all around and then let the whole thing sit to get a nice char. This is the most difficult part: not fiddling with it. I promise that leaving it alone will reward you with some yummy, texturally satisfying fried rice.

Now it’s time to mix back in the bacon and add the egg. I like to make a well in the center of the rice and cook the egg there. Once it’s starting to cook, I fold it into the rice, so you get nice curds of cooked egg.

Finally, you’re done! Garnish with a few green onion slices and enjoy! (And no, the green onion garnish isn’t just to look sexy — it adds a nice fresh flavor too!)

that is all

We went to Santa Barbara, did some outlet shopping, almost went to my friend Bryan’s birthday celebration (LA traffic, I’m not a fan), did some price comparison shopping for alcohol for the wedding, looked at invitations, had some amazing cheesesteaks (seriously, amazing) and most importantly, made some paper pomanders.

When you view these now and you’re getting an early preview of some of our wedding decorations.

At this point, we’re not sure how many of these we’re going to make and everywhere that we plan to hang them, but they will play a role in our decorations. (Not just because they take a while to make, but because they’re pretty.)

Here’s the low down: you take a ball of styrofoam, you take some tissue paper (turns out five for the small ones), group the tissue paper, fold it, use some wire to hold the paper together, fluff the paper and then put the fluffed papers in the styrofoam ball.

It’s not overly difficult (except when you forget to round the ends of the paper like I’ve done), but it’s just a little labor intensive.

Still though, they’re fun to make and we’re going to make a few more before the actual wedding so we have more pretty decorations (along with everything else we’re planning on using).

With the passing of October and Halloween (you did check out our awesome pumpkins, right?), I had officially declared the holiday season open.

Since it was now the holiday season, I knew it was time to get ready to bake some fruitcakes.

Without knowing how many people we were going to give fruitcakes too, or how many we might want to eat ourselves, I decided to quadruple the recipe I unusually use. This means that we now have 15 mini fruitcakes and one larger one (which we subsequently split in half and are eating little by little).

In all honesty, the fruitcakes themselves are pretty easy — let a bunch of fruit soak overnight in rum (Captain Morgan, natch), the next day cook with some sugar and unfiltered apple juice, add the dry ingredients and finally bake (then spritz with brandy every few days until you eat them, the longer you wait, the more complex they taste).

The only issues we were having were because it was such a big batch! Still though, it wasn’t too tough and we persevered.

One of the real losses was that I tried to play some Christmas music streaming through my 360, but the music wasn’t on my computer anywhere to stream. If you know me, or have heard about my luck with computers, you know they often like to die around me (especially hard drives).

Thankfully, I put all of my Christmas music on an external Western Digital hard drive, which seems to work great, but I then lost the power cable for it!

Since this is my one and only Western Digital external drive, I don’t have any spare cables and couldn’t get any music playing for us.

Even though Bing Crosby couldn’t serenade us while we were baking, everything still turned out fantastically!

It was Halloween on Saturday and Alice and I decided it was time to carve pumpkins! Back when we went to the corn maze (a tropical vacation in October mind you), we also picked out some pumpkins to carve.

I’m a pretty festive person, so any opportunity I have to decorate the house I’ll take it — and if it means buying slightly over-priced pumpkins, I’ll do that too.

Fast forward from then to Halloween and we knew it was time to carve.

Alice printed out some patterns while at work on the Friday before Halloween (I took a half day because my department was moving buildings — a move I’m, well, let’s just leave it at rather unhappy about). She decided that our theme this year should be cats.

For herself, she got Kuroneko Sama (a character from Trigun). Amusingly, she didn’t realize who the character was until she got home and started working on her pumpkin. Then, after tracing it out, she said, “Wait a second, I know who this is! I have him on a shot glass!” To prove it, she then went, got the shot glass and we took pictures of the finished product with the glass.

For me, Alice got Puss in Boots (from Shrek). Obviously, someone had vastly misinformed her about my pumpkin-carving prowess.

We started the carving process about noon.

We wrapped up about 4.30.

As you can imagine, our backs were a little sore after (next year, we’re doing it on the table). Though, for taking the better part of four hours, I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out.