Et cetera

Monday, June 17, 2013

Moved!


Due to restricted Blogger access in Asia and popular request from family members (re: hi dad), Feastive will be merged with my Sina microblog from this point forward. Although I mainly post in Chinese and Japanese there, all photo tags are in English so feel free to drop by!

Meanwhile, entries found at this location will remain online as an archive of sorts. Who knows, perhaps it'll be revived one day for some grand purpose... Either way, thanks for reading until now and hope to see you again somewhere in cyberspace!

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Soup or Dessert?


Typically this would be categorized as dessert, though I have always seen it as a diet soup of sorts, full of good items for women with a serious lack of iron. Many thanks to mom for the awesome recipe!

Ingredients: red bean, peanut, red date, coix seed with brown sugar

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Mix Your Miso


As miso soup served at a restaurant tends to contain only orthodox items such as tofu and seaweed, making it at home guarantees more variety in its content and thereby a noticeable increase in nutritious value. A typical bowl of miso soup at my place would include at least four types of vegetables as well as lean pork slices, combined with a soup base made of multiple miso blends. Having a busy week at work? Keep a pot of mouthwatering miso soup in your fridge and dinner will be set for a good few days.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

It's Sweets Time!


Blancmange is one of my favorite summer desserts/snack choices. It's easy to make and quite satisfying to the tummy despite having a low calorie count per serving, accompanied by a rich collection of topping/mixing that helps me a great deal when cleaning certain stock items from the fridge e.g. jam, dry fruits, etc. Give it a shot if you're a health-conscious sweets lover! (Does the last part sound like an oxymoron...?)

Sunday, June 9, 2013

The First Bento


While sorting my photo folder today for a design project, I came across the above shot from several years ago: my very first attempt at bento making. How nostalgic!

To anyone who is learning how to cook like myself, I would highly recommend taking photos of what you make as frequently as possible. Not only is it an effective way for one to stay motivated on his or her cooking/diet schedule (think about lazy weekends after a rough week of work), visual records are always helpful when it comes to providing a better understanding of how much one is learning day by day.

What would your food photo look like a year from now?

Friday, June 7, 2013

Color and Cooking


Presentation is very important to Japanese cooking as a whole, a good example being color combination, which happens to be the one aspect I tend to pay special attention to when preparing a meal. Aside from brown, the color of health in Japanese cooking, I like to include a balanced portion of green, red and yellow--two primary plus one secondary color as noted on a typical color wheel. Such endeavor not only delivers extra aesthetic quality for a dish, but also a better nutritious balance as a 2:1 vegetable to protein ratio is best for digestion, which results in a healthier diet.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Use Your Milk


Milk is a popular ingredient for dishes I make/would like to try out in the future. However, the amount of milk required in a single-person recipe tends to be quite small, and I don't drink milk as is anymore due to calcium overdose as a child. (Think about having 2-3 liters of milk a day due to orders by grandparents...)

With that said, since milk is typically sold in 1 liter size containers and relatively easy to expire, a milk carton could move straight into garbage category after being used only once or twice in my kitchen, which is a lot of waste. Then I came across a simple recipe on the website of a Japanese farm that teaches how to make tofu using just milk and white vinegar, which I tried right away and voila, problem solved! Milk tofu is now one of my favorite side dishes at dinner, served with home-made sauces of all kinds that makes both my fridge and my tummy very happy.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Dragon Boat Festival


Eating chimaki (zhongzi in Chinese) in celebration of the Dragon Boat Festival! The filling tends to differ per region, and my family usually makes the following versions each year: red bean and peanut. Yum!

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Rediscover Your Salad


I used to hate salads with a passion, which is probably not a surprise considering how much of a junk eater I was before discovering the joy of home cooking. It took some time before I came to the realization that salads require as much personalization as any other complicated dish to become truly likable, i.e. how a recipe learned from books/TV shows is always tweaked according to one's unique daily intake preference before it is made into a staple at respective households.

Whether it be the choice of vegetables or seasoning used, keep trying until you arrive at the absolute best combination for you and you only--that would be when you truly appreciate having a salad at your dining table time after time.