Food: descovering new combos

Last week I’ve been exploring new food combos. I forgot how fun is to try new combos and new tastes. I’m glad I did. 🙂

I haven’t had sweet oatmeal for ages!!!

I made this bowl using 1/2 cup oatmeal, 1/2 cup water, 1/2 cup silk vanilla and 1/2 cup frozen blueberries

topped with a big spoonful of almond butter.

The next day I had savory breakkie

1 WW english muffin (Tj’s), 1 wedge of LC and 1 fried egg

together with a glass of silk vanilla. I had this combo four times! 😆 I guess I still prefer savory combos.

And then I had a chinese breakfast today

1/2 cup oatmeal cooked with 1.5 cup water

the red paste is fermented tofu

and 1 vegetarian dumpling!

I like this combo, I’ll definitely have it more often.

For lunch one day I had grilled salmon with assorted veggies and baked acorn squash

another day I had baked tilapia, broccoli, bok choy and soba noodles

For dinner I asked my mom to make wonton for me. Sudden cravings were satisfied 😉

it was made with greens, smoked tofu and shrimp

YUM YUM YUM~ I had three times, 15 each time, full belly, happy Coco! 🙂

Food exploration has started! 🙂 Stay tuned!

Q: Have you tried any new combo lately?

Recipe: pound cake, chocolate “milk” and more

Last Friday, before Star came back I baked two mini pound cake for him. What a great wife I am! 😀

Ingredients:

• 100g butter (room temperature)
• 100g flour
• 70g sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 50g banana chips + almonds

Beat sugar+butter+eggs until very puffy

Soaked the banana chips with some warm milk, get rid of the milk and blend

Pour the batter to two mini moldes

bake at 350F for 35 min

isn’t it pretty?

I made again the black chicken soup. Something that I want to comment about soup. In chinese culture, soup is not just food, but also a “medicine”. There is actually a word for that, 药膳，medicine food. It usually combines different ingredients that have medicinal values with everyday ingredients. The idea is heal or get healthier with daily food.

For this soup, I added these: 黄芪 (radix astragali) to invigorate Qi, 当归 (Dongui) and red dates to build blood and dry shiitake.

Stir-fry continued to be a staple for me. This one has broccoli, mushrooms, bamboo, green peppers and eggplant.

Bok choy with smoked pork belly

Star was working while I cooked and it was funny to see where he choice to do the conference call. 😉

oh… that’s Charlotte from Sex and the City! Yes, I’m watching it for the 1000000 times!

Another stir-fry: chinese mustard greens, red peppers, chinese yam and bean curd stick

Yam noodles with chinese cabbage, black fungus, shiitake, dry shrimp and a poached egg.

For breakfast I’ve been having these two combos:

#1 oatmeal cooked with chia gel and pumpkin puree

I made some almond butter

#2 pumpkin bread with AB

with homemade chocolate milk.

I love Almond Breeze Chocolate but I don’t buy it anymore. Why? Because although I love how it tastes, it’s not very nutritious. So I make my own bean milk (soy bean, black bean, aduki and mung bean) and add 1-2 tbsp of unsweetened cocoa powder. Voila…. a nutritious bean milk!

Q: What’s your favorite cloth and shoe store/brand?

A colorful post

First, few personal notes:

• I fall down two days ago and now my right hip hurts whenever I make a movement 😦
• I did my first run in 2011! I’ve been wanting to run outdoor for a long time but the weather and the knee problem hold me until yesterday. I only did 3 miles and I felt them!!! How easy to lose resistance so quickly? (well…. 4-5 months). Bad news: my knee is still not okay. I didn’t feel sharp pain as I used to have after running just 1 mile, but at the end, I could feel that the pain was coming. So I’ll go to the doc and hopefully she can figure out what’s going on.
• New challenge: cut back on coffee. From now on, I’ll be having only 1 cup (half mug) of coffee in the morning (I was having 3-4 cups daily). I’d like to eliminate caffeine completely but the reality is I like coffee too much to take it away completely from one day to the other. If this goes well, in a month or two, I’ll cut it to 1/2 cup.

Okay. Let’s start this colorful post.

Breakfast: orange + red

oatmeal cooked with pumpkin puree and 1 beaten egg, topped with bean curd with fermented red date

Lunch: black, red, green and purple

sauteed black fungus, asparagus, shiitake, red peppers and vegetarian chicken

brown rice, purple cabbage and edamame cooked in the rice cooker with miso

Dinner: green, red, yellow

stir-fry chinese mustard, mushrooms, red peppers and fresh bamboo (I’m loving it, you’ll see them more!)

What’s missing in this palette? Blue! I consumed it in form of movie. Blue Valentine

Are you a big fan of The Notebook as I am? Do you like Ryan Gosling? I love him! He’s my favorite actor and he’s the perfect lover!

I went to watch it thinking that it’s going to be another love story. Well… yes, it is a love story, but a sad one. If The Notebook is too romantic to be true, this one is the opposite. It’s an elegy for love, a monument to heartbreak.  Blue Valentine understands love, processes it in ways we see in our own lives more than we do on the big screen.

After I watched it, I can’t get it out of my head. It is both sweet and emotionally devastating. The drama is about a couple whose relationship is warm and fuzzy at first but then grows cold and bitter over time. It is a reality check and it shows precisely what I talked about yesterday, marriage is not just about passion and feelings; if other things don’t match, failure is guaranteed.

Maybe not everyone wants to see a reality-check movie, one that shows the dark side of love and marriage. But I really like it. If you decide to watch it, I wouldn’t recommend you to go with your loved one.

Q: who’s your favorite actor?