Food: playing around

From time to time I feel lost in term of what to eat. I don’t want the same thing anymore (chao stir-fries), I want something exciting, fun, new, tasty and filling food to eat. So creativity and imagination (both that I’m not good at) come to play.

Since last week salad I’m hooked with avocado. I picked 4 large avocados last week and every morning the first thing I do is to check whether another one is ripped 😯

For breakfast I’ve been having either this

I made a batch of black rice, aduki beans and barley. So I’d either add white fungus or simply avocado.

Both are YUM~

As meal, I’ve been having spinach cannelloni. For the sauce I used 1/3 cup pumpkin puree, 2 tbsp nutrtional yeast and 2 tbsp of milk.

Love this meal~~~ 🙂 It’s so easy (just heat the frozen cannelloni and make the sauce, 5 min top) and so tasty!

Last weekend Star and I went to the farmer’s market. I’m so happy to see more fresh produce! I got a bunch of greens.

rainbow chards

sauteed in butter

steamed brussels sprouts broiled for 5 min

soft boiled egg (insert the egg into boiling water for 1-2 min, turn off the heat, cover and wait for 3 min more)

I said I’m obsessed with avocado but you only saw it in breakfast once. How come? Well… I’ve been eating a lot of salad, all massaged with 1/2 large avocado. For the dressing, I used miso/pumpkin/tahini/mustard mix. I’m loving the flavor of this dressing.

A salad with fat (avocado and tahini) and protein (salmon) is a full meal. You’d be surprised that a salad can satisfy you so much and for so long (at least 4 hrs).

Q: What’s your favorite way to eat avocado?

Food: bamboo tutorial

Fresh bamboo is my latest obsession. I can’t get enough of them. I add it to everything. It’s hard to describe the taste. But I think the closest thing would be palm hearts. So I thought I’d share this with you. If you see it at the asian market, give it a try~ 🙂

This is how it looks.  In my local asian market, $2.99/lb

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First peel it off everything that is brown.

Then boil the entire piece in hot water for 5 min.

This is what you get. It’s pretty small compared to the size of the original bamboo.

cut in your desire form and add to the meal.

If you can’t find fresh ones, there’s canned too. It’s much cheaper but less tasty and less crunchy.

I used it as topping for pizza

other toppings in this pizza: oyster mushroom, zucchini and mozzarella.

To stir-fries. This one has also bok choy, mushrooms, green peas and salmon.

this one has green cabbage, green peppers, black fungus, bamboo and dry shrimp.

all these stir-fries were made with this magic sauce: olive preserved olive leafs

in less than two weeks, I’m seeing the bottom of this jar 😉

I made a batch of brown rice/aduki/barley. It tastes like dessert!

served with stir-fry and a poached egg

I’m succeeding on microwave poached egg!

and rice cake with bok choy in a very spicy sauce! 😯 What happens to my taste buds lately? I crave spicy food!

I did a lot of online shopping today! My purse “hurts”. I’ll post them soon 😉

Have a nice weekend everyone. Mine will to be fantastic!!!!!!

Q: What was the last thing you purchased online?

Two Es and a floral dinner~~

Hi everyone. How was your Monday? tough? Mine too! 😦 I’m seeing new “faces” so I want to WELCOME all new readers! 🙂 Thanks for stopping by, hope you like it and come back soon! And don’t be shy, leave comments or email me if you want to know more about me or anything that I didn’t say it clearly (sorry by my poor gramma and spelling).

Today I want to present you two programs that I’ve been using lately! 🙂

Disclaimer: I present these programs to you because I find them really helpful. As I love you so much, I want to share the best with you! 🙂 Nobody asked to me do it and I paid for my copy. (just in case if someone’s wondering why I’m doing this)

So many recipes to try but don’t know how to organize them? Here’s the solution that worked for me!

I was looking for an easy way to save the recipes that I find online, and then be able to find them later easily. Sometimes I bookmarked a web page, but it didn’t help when the internet was down, or it had been deleted. I tried saving them in Word files, but they were hard to search for, and I couldn’t always remember the recipe names. As result, I had recipes disorganized that I never go back to try them.

Evernote made it easy to organize them. When I find a recipe online, I just highlight what I wanted to save on the page (including the photo), click a button, and that was it! You can add tags to your notes, so it’s really easy to search if you want to look for a specific recipe or ingredient. If you don’t remember the name of the recipe, you can preview the recipes scrolling through them. The format is extremely simple, you need exactly 30 sec to save a recipe. And you know what’s the best part? it’s FREE!!! Seriously, it worth trying. Go try it.

Ecto

Are you a Mac user and blogger? Are you looking for an editor to blog offline? ECTO might be a good choice. I was spending like 90 min in every post because it takes a lot of time uploading pictures (one by one) which was very annoying. So I asked Tina and Zesty which program can I use since I have a Mac and Windows Live Writer doesn’t work for me. They both recommended Ecto to me, so I had to give it a try.

Ecto publish to almost any blog from you Mac, it’s easy to use, it has almost all the features as you blog directly online, uploading pics takes 2 sec ;), you can blog offline, publish later or save it as a draft.

I used the 21 days trial first, and after 10 days I already decided to buy it. I think it was <$20. I am so happy with it so I strongly recommend you to try it! 😀

Okay. Enough technology talk, lets get back to the food business. I’ll warn you, food wasn’t spectacular yesterday. Although I spend $50 on groceries on Sunday, I realized that mostly they were lettuce and cauliflower. 😦

Breakfast: gigantic navel orange + Nature’s pride 12 grains + 2 toppings: almond butter (homemade) and preserve

look how yummy was this toast: AB was almost as thick as the bread

I worked at office so brought lunch, which was the most exciting part of the 7 hours I spent there 😕 Krista’s cauliflower & barley pilaf

Dinner was floral themed! 😀 not because of the ingredients, but because of the container!

tofu stir fry with mini corns and black fungus

celery oat bran

All together: a pretty floral dinner~~ 😀 (did I trick you? ;))

I run out of kabocha so I had this lotus powder

it looks like this after pouring hot water

And Mint Dark Chocolate, recommended by Veggiegirl

I loveeeee it!!! Another great find! 😀 Can’t wait to try their other flavors!

Q1: How do you organize recipes that you find online?

Q2: How long do you spend on writing a post?