East Meets West

Today was our 9th wedding anniversary, and I woke to the aroma of potato latkes frying on the stove. Brandon made them just the way I like them, brown and crispy, with my favorite dipping sauce - soy sauce and minced garlic.

Given the latke's Jewish/German roots, soy sauce is a somewhat unusual dressing for this potato pancake, which is typically served with sour cream or applesauce. But I swear, I didn't make up the unique combo myself!

Growing up in Hawaii, my best friend was a hapa girl named Heide, whose mother was from Germany and father was Taiwanese. I never forgot those post-sleepover mornings, when we'd tear apart the pancakes with our fingers and dip them into little bowls filled with the murky, savory and slightly spicy mix of soy sauce and garlic.

Latkes and soy sauce exemplies what is best about Hawaii - it's colorful, mixed-plate culture.

By the time I thought to include Brandon's latkes in my blog, I'd already polished off the entire platter. Well, all but this lone pancake.

Father's Day with a Twist

Sunday was Brandon's first Father's Day, so I decided to make him something really special - Mac & Cheese. It's one of his favorite things to eat, and one of my least favorite. When we were first married, he came home from the grocery store one day with 10 boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. "It was on sale," he announced, proudly. "Buy five, get five free."

"Yeah, but 10 boxes? How are we going to eat all that? It's powdered cheese."

"What are you talking about? I grew up on this stuff."

Now, I'm fourth-generation Asian American, and I grew up eating rice balls wrapped in seaweed, Chinese jook and fried rice with spicy, pickled mustard greens. But as I said, my family has lived in this country for four generations, so my mom also made a lot of spaghetti, meat loaf and, my personal favorite, corned beef and cabbage.

But not macaroni and cheese, and definitely not out of a box.

Then a couple weeks before Father's Day I was watching "Barefoot Contessa" and was inspired to make a more sophisticated, grown-up version of Brandon's favorite comfort food. Ina's Truffle Mac & Cheese was sure to blow Kraft out of our cupboard for good.

First, I had to make sure I could get my hands on truffle butter. Apparently, they sell the stuff online, but I was able to find a 3 oz. package of black truffle butter at a specialty food store near my home for a whopping $10. I didn't even want to think about how many boxes of Kraft I could buy with 10 bucks.

"I know what I'm going to make you for Father's Day," I told Brandon one evening while we were watching TV.

"Oh yeah? What?"

"I'm not going to tell you. You'll just have to wait and see."

Brandon started pestering me days before. "So what's for dinner?" he asked, striving for nonchalance, as we drove home from the Farmers' Market.

"Don't worry," I assured him when he asked for the third time. "You're going to like it. Trust me."

"It's something I like, or something you think I'm going to like?" he probed.

"It's something you like, but with a twist."

Except for fresh mushrooms, which I found at the Farmers' Market, I had everything else already in my pantry. I started cooking about about an hour before my parents were due to arrive. I sauteed the mushrooms and set them aside, and once I got water boiling for the pasta, I started scalding the milk. So far so good.

I got nervous once the truffle butter hit the hot pan, and I began whisking in flour for the roux. The earthy aroma wafting over the stove top served as a constant reminder not to screw up this mother sauce, or I'd be throwing the mother of all fits.

But the bechamel turned out creamy and smooth. I knew it was done once I ran my finger along the back of the wooden spoon and the sauce didn't immediately cover over the drawn line.

Typically, I like to tinker with recipes and add my own twist. But I'd never made macaroni and cheese before. It's not even something I've eaten very much, so I decided to stick to Ina's exacting instructions.

Both the surprise and the dish itself were hugely successful. Even after I carried my jadeite casserole platter to the table, Brandon was still trying to figure out what I'd made since the macaroni was disguised by toasted breadcrumbs.

"This is the best mac & cheese I've ever had," he exclaimed, after he'd had a few bites. "The truffle butter makes a big difference."

This recipe was so good, even I've become a mac & cheese fan.

Green Tea and Guinea Pigs

Emi's upcoming 1st birthday has me in a tizzy over all the party planning details. Okay, sure it's still more than four months away, but I don't even have a theme yet! Last weekend we went to my friend's son's 1st birthday party and I was inspired by her toy blocks cake (which took her six hours to decorate.) On the way home I resolved to bake and decorate Emi's cake.

But what kind of cake should I make? And how should I decorate it? Should I go with something commercial like Sesame Street, or was there some way to incorporate Emi's favorite board book Where is Baby's Belly Button by Karen Katz? I quickly discarded both ideas - one was too easy, the other too hard. My sister wanted to make panda bear cupcakes, but I wasn't totally sold on the idea.

The next night I was up late watching "Cake Boss" when my muse struck. I remembered a beautiful wedding cake I saw on Charm City Cake's web site. It was covered in a pale green fondant with dark tree branches wending up along the sides. Delicate, pink cherry blossoms added another dimension to the cake, which was topped by an origami-like crane. I loved this cake.

"This cake is so amazing, it would almost be worth divorcing you and getting remarried, just to have this cake at my wedding," I'd told Brandon.

Not exactly appropriate for a 1 year-old's birthday.

But that didn't mean I couldn't play around with the motif, right? I'd made Emi's birth announcements using Japanese washi paper that had hopping bunnies and cherry blossoms ... Come to think of it, we had green tea cupcakes topped with fondant cherry blossoms cutouts at my baby shower.

"Brandon, I know what kind of cake I'm going to make for Emi's party!" I exclaimed, shaking my slumbering husband. "Green tea cake filled with fresh strawberries and whipped cream frosting, decorated with bunnies and cherry blossoms. What do you think?"

"I think you should go to sleep!"

But I laid awake for another hour, finalizing the details in my head. I decided to do a practice round using my Auntie Midori's family as guinea pigs. Brandon and my dad were going to play in a Bay Area golf tournament the day before Father's Day, so the whole family planned to spend the day visiting Auntie Midori.

I started baking late Thursday night, after the summer heat had waned from 96 degrees to somewhere in the low 80s. My initial plan was to use a recipe I found on the Internet, which I'd used to make green tea cupcakes for my baby shower last year. But after 45 minutes in the oven the center still jiggled slightly, while the edges were already well past "golden brown."

I decided to try a different tact.

Grabbing my copy of "Barefoot Contessa" from the cupboard, I scanned Ina's recipe for chocolate buttercream cake and a plan began to take shape. I just omitted the cocoa powder and vanilla, and substituted green tea for brewed coffee. Here's what I did:

Green Tea Cake

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/4 tsp. kosher salt

3/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

2/3 cup granulated sugar

2/3 cup light brown sugar, packed

2 large eggs, room temperature

1 cup whole milk

1/2 cup sour cream, room temperature

2 tbs. green tea "matcha" powder

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line the bottoms of two cake pans with parchment paper, then butter the paper and pans before dusting with flour. Tap the pans to remove any excess flour. In a bowl, combine flour, baking soda and salt.

Using another bowl, whisk together milk, sour cream and green tea until well combined.

Cream together butter and sugars using an electric mixer set on high. Lower the mixer's speed and add the eggs. Set the mixer to low and alternately add the milk mixture and flour in thirds, starting with the milk and ending with flour.

Pour the batter evenly into the two cake pans and bake on the middle rack for 25 to 30 minutes. Let the cakes cool for 10 minutes on a rack before removing from pans. Cool cakes completely before icing.

While the cakes were baking in the oven, I started working on the decorations. I kneaded food coloring into some fondant and rolled out pink and green pancakes, before cutting out floral and leaf shapes with vegetable cutters I'd bought at Nishiki Market in Kyoto. But I had used too much rose-colored icing gel and ended up with bright, pink flowers - day-glow bright.

They were also flat and uninteresting. I tried adding some dimension by curling up the petals using my thumbs since I didn't have one of those ball tool thingies I'd seen professional pastry chefs use on TV. But all I did was overstretch the fondant. Frustrated, I scrapped the flowers and rolled them back into a ball, deciding to tackle the issue later.

I was still chewing over the problem the next morning when Brandon came into the kitchen and started examining my cake decorations. "Are they supposed to be this hard?" he asked, tapping one of the leaves. "Is it edible?" Opening another container, he pulled out the fluorescent pink sugar ball I'd abandoned the night before. "What is this?"

"Fondant," I replied defensively. "It's for the cherry blossoms."

He looked at the fondant skeptically. "Maybe you've been watching too many cake shows."

But another idea had come to me during the night. After shooing Brandon out of the kitchen, I used a knife to carefully etch veins on the now-hardened sugar leaves. It worked! The additional detailing gave the fondant leaves more depth. I used the same technique to give the flower petals some definition.

Ha! Eat that Brandon!

Since it was summer, I wanted to keep dessert light and refreshing so instead of the traditional buttercream frosting, I went with a chocolate whipped cream icing recipe I found on epicurious and just left out the cocoa.

I sliced some strawberries and dusted them with powdered sugar to take away some of the tartness. While the berries macerated in the fridge, I took out the first cake layer and placed it flatside up before carefully spreading a layer of frosting over the surface with an offset spatula. Next, I arranged strawberry slices over the frosting, making sure fruit covered the entire cake, and added more frosting. Then I carefully plopped the second cake layer on the filling, flatside up, and began frosting the rest of the cake.

When it was time to serve my dessert, I arranged three blossoms and three leaves in the center of the cake. In the end, the cake looked pretty, but the taste was only so-so. It was a lot denser than I thought it would be, and you could barely taste the green tea. I left the cake uncovered in the fridge for several hours, so that most likely contributed to the denseness and probably flavor as well.

Ultimately, I realized green tea cake with strawberry filling is probably too sophisticated for a 1 year-old. I still think it's a great flavor combination, and I'll probably tinker with the recipe a bit more. But for now, I've got to practice making white cake with buttercream frosting.

The other night I had another great idea - making homemade ice cream for Emi's birthday. I decided to let her eat cake and ice cream for the first time at her party...

A Taste of New York

For a few years when I was a little girl, my family lived in New York City, and even though I was barely five when we left, I remember a lot. Going to see the giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade perched on my father's shoulders, and late-night trips to the bakery for pumpernickel bagels.

Sometimes Auntie Sharon would visit, bringing with her a box of rugelach from Elmhurst's Du Bois Pastry as a special weekend treat. Possibly the world's best cookie, this Jewish sweet has a unique, tangy dough with a sweet, nutty center. I remember the anticipation as we all gathered around the table in my parents' cramped, New York kitchen, watching the twine fall away from the white, cardboard bakery box. I loved the crunchy nuts and the way puffs of powdered sugar would swirl beneath my nose when I bit into a cookie.

Despite trying countless store-bought rugelach, and sampling other bakeries attempts, I've never been able to recapture the perfection of those New York City cookies. But I have to say, this recipe I found comes pretty, damn close.

June 11 was Auntie Sharon's 60th birthday, so I sent her a belated batch of rugelach. In addition to the traditional version with raspberry jam, raisins and walnuts, I was inspired by a jar of Nutella I found in my cupboard. I replaced the jam with the chocolate hazelnut spread, then sprinkled some walnuts and cinnamon over the Nutella and OMG! Best. Cookie. Ever.

Happy Birthday Auntie Sharon!

Rugelach

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup, or 2 sticks, unsalted butter, softened

8 ounces cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 cup apricot preserves or raspberry jam

1 cup loosely packed golden raisins, chopped

1 1/4 cup walnuts, finely chopped

milk for brushing cookies

Whisk together flour and salt in a bowl. Beat together butter and cream cheese with an electric mixer until well combined. Slowly add flour mixture and mix until a soft dough forms. If you have a stand mixer such as Kitchen Aid, you can replace the paddle with a dough hook.

Gather the dough into a small ball and wrap in plastic, then flatten into a rectangle roughly 7 by 5-inches in size. Chill in the refrigerator until firm, between 8 and 24 hours.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and place the rack in the middle position. Whisk 1/2 cup sugar with cinnamon. Cut dough into 4 equal pieces. Chill 3 pieces, wrapped in plastic wrap, and roll out remaining piece into a 12 by 8-inch rectangle on a well-floured surface with a floured rolling pin.

Arrange dough rectangle onto work surface with a long side nearest you. Spread 1/2 cup preserves evenly over dough with a spatula. Sprinkle 1/4 cup raisins and a rounded 1/4 cup of walnuts over jam, then sprinkle with 2 tablespoons cinnamon sugar. Using parchment as aid, roll up dough tightly into a log. Place, seam side down, in lined baking pan, then pinch ends closed and tuck underneath.

Roll out the remaining dough in the same manner and make three more logs. Place the logs on a pan 1-inch apart. Brush logs with milk. With a sharp knife, make 3/4 -inch-deep cuts crosswise in dough, but don't cut all the way through, at 1-inch intervals. (If dough is too soft, chill until firmer, 20 to 30 minutes.)

Bake until golden, 35 to 40 minutes. Cool to warm on pan or rack, about 30 minutes, then transfer logs to a cutting board and slice cookies all the way through. Then dust with powdered sugar and serve.

Update: I took some to my mom's office and instantly got recipe requests from her co-workers. I'm bringing in another batch next week for my mom's last day of work. I think this time I'm going to add some espresso to the Nutella ... Stay tuned!

Anime & Arare

Brandon is the faculty adviser for his school's Anime Club. Every Wednesday after school, students gather in his classroom and watch Japanese cartoons he downloads off the Internet and stores on his iPod. Now that the year is drawing to a close, he decided to throw a party for the anime club, and I thought Kaki Mochi Cookies would be the perfect treat.

Kaki mochi, also known as arare or Japanese rice crackers, is a popular Asian snack. When my family lived in Hawaii, we learned to mix it with popcorn. Oishi desu ne!

A little while ago my aunt visited the Big Island and brought back a bag of chocolate chip arare cookies. At $8 per dozen, they were pretty darn good cookies. It was the holidays, and I'd recently given birth so my drive to bake and eat was in high gear. I set out to replicate the unique cookie.

Turns out it wasn't so hard. I found a recipe online in a matter of seconds. I like to use miniature dark chocolate chips, and I also grind the rice crackers and Rise Krispies in a food processor for a few seconds rather than crushing them. It's less mess, and you get a more consistent crumble. I use a cookie dough scoop and typically end up getting about 4 dozen, not 6. I bake them in a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes and they come out crisp and golden brown.

These days you can find some sort of rice cracker at most grocery stores. I grew up eating the kind that comes in a variety of shapes - flowers, diamonds, rectangles - and is packaged in a box. When we lived in Baltimore, where rice crackers were impossible to find, my grandmother would send them from California in care packages. Mom and I spent many a night sharing a box for a midnight snack.

Pub Crawl to Nowhere

When Brandon & I went on our whirlwind European tour the summer of 2005, we were on a shoestring budget, and in London that meant eating at a lot of cheap pubs. Luckily for Brandon, he loves traditional fish and chips. Me, not so much.

Then last night on a "Barefoot Contessa" rerun, she was making fish & chips, and I remembered I still had some dover fish in the freezer. Ina's recipe was simple, and looked easy enough to execute so I decided to give it a go. I've yet to go wrong with one of Ina's dishes.

But as much as I love Ina's recipes, I usually end up giving them my own little twist and her fish & chips was no exception. I substituted water in the batter for cold beer, and dredged the fish pieces in flour before dipping them in the batter. And although her recipe calls for cod, I used the thinner dover and some red snapper. Brandon and my dad preferred the snapper because it was thicker and meatier, but I liked the dover.

We also played around with the chips, using both red potatoes and Japanese yams. I discovered satsuma imo at our local Japanese market several months ago and became an instant convert. Its red skin looks very similar to your garden variety garnet yams, but inside the flesh is white. In addition to a shorter cooking time, these Japanese yams have a more subtle, sweet flavor than regular ones. I like to bake them with a little bit of olive oil, salt and pepper and serve them with ham, or fry them up as tempura.

Although my English fish & chips night was a success, I have to say, I'm still not a big fan. I think next time I'm going to make a dipping sauce with some vinegar, red chilies, fish sauce and garlic to give it an Asian spin.

Craving Ramen

Before Emi was born, I decided we were going to "raise her green" and go organic. Well, as much as possible, anyway. We started by switching to organic milk while I was still pregnant, and later we began buying organic eggs, pasta, spinach, apples, etc. Just the other night, Brandon came home with mint chocolate chip ice cream from Trader Joe's that's made with milk from cows not treated with rBST.

Since Emi started eating solids, I've been making my own baby food using only fresh, USDA-certified organic fruits and veggies I found either at the Farmers' Market or sometimes Trader Joe's. I even bought an organic chicken and a bag of organic, long-grain rice to make Chinese jook, or rice porridge, for Emi.

I've been all about what's fresh, organic, Farmers' Market, made-from-scratch.

But sometimes a girl just needs some comfort food. Sapparo Ichiban instant ramen noodles is to Asian Americans, what a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese is to all you round eyes out there.

So after picking up more BPA-free containers for Emi's homemade, organic baby food, and a quick trip to the natural food store to buy organic apples, sweet potatoes and bread flour, I satisfied my hunger with a steaming bowl of reconstituted noodles swimming in MSG-laden broth.

Yum!