gluten-free Archives - Page 3 of 6

hot honeycomb candy

10.28.2015

I can’t decide what I’m more excited about sharing this morning. This honeycomb candy, feathery-crisp with a subtle heat, dunked gleefully into dark chocolate, and perfectly Halloween-color-schemed, or the book that it came from, The New Sugar & Spice. Both are playful, just the right amount of unconventional, and totally awesome, pretty much just like the lady behind them, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that they are both in my kitchen right now (except there’s not much left of the honeycomb, actually).

bibim-bar! (a bibimbap party)

10.07.2015

We had a bibimbap party this weekend! I don’t know whether it’s a function of living in frenetic New York, or having a lot of lawyer friends who are forever sucked back into the office on weekends or late nights, or even just being supposedly “grown-up,” but sometimes it’s startling how easy it is to blink and find that it’s been months since we’ve caught up with some of our friends. So, because the answer to everything is always food, B2 and I made it our goal every couple of months to shove all our random crap into closets, actually Swiffer the floors for once, and have people over for a low-key potluck. Earlier this summer we had a taco party where I made my first pico de gallo ever (I know, how) and Jessica‘s amazing Chipotle-style corn salsa, and overestimated the amount of meat people would eat by about 200% (I still have taco meat in the freezer). And this weekend we had a bibim-bar!

frankies spuntino caesar salad with salmon

08.19.2015

A few months ago, a super exciting thing happened and I leveled up into my own office at work (we share for the first few years). OK, so it’s true, it has no windows. That comes after three years. But for the first time I have a little cave all to myself! I went a tad crazy decorating my haven with gratuitously shiny file racks and cups shaped like fishes and a couple of the dreamy cookbooks I’ve been coveting, like Karen Mordechai’s Sunday Suppers and Kristen Miglore’s Food52 Genius Recipes. It’s pretty much all the things I do not need to practice law. But it makes my new nook so homey! (And it gives me a neat little escape from work whenever I feel like daydreaming about food.)

fig, rose, & almond granola parfaits

08.05.2015

Figs are here! We finally had our first figs of the year this weekend, and words cannot adequately express how excited I am. I feel like my first fig sighting is always one of the best days of the summer, even if it means fall isn’t far away, but this year I’ve been even more eager than usual to catch a glimpse of those plump little soldiers standing in their neat, blue-purple rows under the awning at our favorite produce store.

charred corn with miso butter, bacon & garlic scapes

07.22.2015

Last Saturday, when we were still puttering around in the throes of jet lag, a good friend dropped by to help ease us back into the real world. She belongs to that lucky (for us) class of friends where the apartment is never too messy to have them pop in and where a squishy couch and some food is all you need for “entertainment,” which was perfect, because that’s pretty much what we had — half-unpacked duffels in the corner and all.

coffee-candied macadamia nuts + a giveaway!

06.24.2015

It’s almost here! We’re actually, really, truly getting married this Saturday and I’m so excited I can’t sit still. This is the last post in this series on our reception food, and after that I’ll finally stop yammering to you about it — in three days, we’ll be noshing on these caramelized onion & Boursin tartlets, this spicy ahi poke parfaitini, and slicing into a real-people version of this cake, among other things (like a rosemary-perfumed short rib and vibrant purple Okinawan sweet potato puree, be still my heart). And as our wedding favors, we’ll be handing out this last recipe!

spicy ahi poke, avocado & rice “parfaitinis”

06.15.2015

It’s our wedding menu! Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing homemade versions of some of our reception eats, our cake, and our wedding favors. You can see the recipe for one of our cocktail hour appetizers here!

As much as I care about food, choosing our wedding caterer was kind of a black box for us. We wanted the food to be, you know, good, but other than that, all we really knew was that we really, really wanted poke. Spicy ahi poke (preferably from Foodland) is one of B2’s favorite foods, and even though we figured we’d be going with the standard beef-or-fish-or-vegetarian choices for our entrees, we were really hoping it could make an appearance elsewhere. I’d be lying if I said we didn’t briefly consider asking whoever would be the ones making our food to please just buy out an entire Foodland stash and serve it up as our second course, plating optional.

hurricane popcorn // a hawaii series!

05.20.2015

Right around this time two years ago, I christened this baby-blog with a little birthday series for Bowl #2 — they were something like my third, fourth, and fifth posts, and they were recipes for some of his favorite foods from back home in Hawaii. With another one of his trips around the sun approaching (and because I can never have enough food from Hawaii), I thought that this would be a good time to do a repeat of sorts — this time with a little bit extra! His birthday is just a couple weeks before a little event I can’t stop talking about (sorry) and ever since we figured out our reception menu, I’ve been planning to try to recreate some of the dishes to share with you. Since we happen to be getting married in Hawaii, it seemed perfect to mash it all up! So for the next six weeks or so, I’ll be sharing a couple more recipes for his favorite childhood Hawaii dishes, mixed in with a few homemade versions of the eats from our wedding menu. Since I can’t invite you all to our shindig, I figured this was the next best way to celebrate it with you. <3

kimchi potato salad (& regular too!)

05.12.2015

So Bowl #2 and I have just come to accept that we’re the kind of people whose well-being depends a little pitifully on warm weather. I feel like that should have been obvious to two people from Hawaii and South Carolina, but with every Northeastern spring that’s come along we’re still baffled at how suddenly we’re real people again, wanting to do things and go places and see folks, hatched from gloomy, hibernatory sofa-dwellers who would never do a crazy thing like, say, leave the house. But that weather is here now, and we’re at the park on weekends and rattling iced coffees and out and about, and it’s amazing! I think the thaw is even more pronounced this year, now that we have less than two months to go until our wedding and we’re getting into what feels like the best parts of planning — the (strangely fun) seating chart, music playlists, naming our tables, planning out the program. Evenings where we plan to go to bed at a reasonable hour launch suddenly into late nights because we can’t stop talking about what readings to do at the ceremony and when during dinner the toasts should be. It’s beginning to feel real, and I love it.

mango pomelo sago, with haupia

04.22.2015

I’ve written a lot about how much I love the food in Hong Kong. I’ll probably write more even after this. I’m a food-oriented person to begin with (I know, shocker) and the places I’ve been and the memories I have are, a lot of times, defined by the things I ate and savored and enjoyed in any one place at any one time. But all that said, Hong Kong might still be the greatest food city I’ve ever been to.

The first real meal I had in Hong Kong was courtesy of my cousin, who is lucky enough to call HK home and to whom I owe about 85% of my HK food journey. He took me to a traditional Cantonese restaurant, the sort with the ubiquitous Lazy Susan crowded with small plates and bamboo baskets, and the first dish he ordered was, fittingly, a plate of the most perfect char siu, lacquered ruby red and glistening, sliced into pieces with the fat and lean distributed just so. I’m pretty sure from that first bite (or, that first plate, since I think I single-handedly ate all of it) I didn’t have a bad meal for the entire four months I was there. Chewy, crumbly pineapple cakes from Kee Wah, nibbled in their plastic jackets on an open-air walkway from Central to Sheung Wan; fish ball skewers in electric yellow curry on a narrow street in Causeway Bay; “quicksand” lau sa bao filled with molten egg custard at a dim sum joint that opened at 3 AM for the late night crowd. Creamy yuan yang and silky-soft scrambled eggs on toast at Australia Dairy Company. A mountain of ground pork with a single salted duck yolk perched exactly on top, the most umami-filled dish I’ve ever had, ordered for me in fluid Cantonese by a friend and shared under fluorescent lighting in a hole-in-the-wall on a balmy fall night. I used to take the bus to a random neighborhood and just wander, window-shopping food things, until I found something I wanted to eat, and from the KFC egg tarts to the best, penthouse restaurant hairy crab, it was all some of the best food I’ve ever had.