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Two Red Bowls

Two Red Bowls

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About the Bowls

breakfast in bed // savory stuffed french toast

who are you, and what are the two red bowls?

Hi!  I’m Cynthia, an avid eater and dabbling food-maker living in California with my husband, “Bowl #2,” and our baby bowl, Luke.  I’m also a lawyer, so when I’m not cooking and chasing a baby around our sunny apartment, you can find me in a law firm in downtown Los Angeles.  I am probably the one breaking the copy machine again.

This little blog came about when I was in my last year of law school, living and cooking in a basement apartment with B2, my then-boyfriend and good-humored taste-tester.  (He eats both my culinary successes and failures with dignity and aplomb.)  The two plastic red bowls were his, and after taking grainy phone photo after grainy phone photo of meals I’d made in them, I kept thinking it would be nice to put them all somewhere.  Well, it ended up being here!  After how good those bowls were to us meal after meal, there seemed no better namesake than them.

Nowadays, the food that makes its way here is usually comfort food, and easy, with occasional Asian influences from my Chinese background and B2’s Korean mother, and a touch of Southern here and there from my childhood in South Carolina.  All that I know I learned from my mother, grandmother, mother-in-law, and the Internet, so if I can make it, you definitely can.

two red bowls

how often do you post?

I try to post once a week.  If my day job gets a little crazy, or our baby bowl a little wild, the posts might not be so frequent, but you’ll find new recipes here at least a few times a month.

how do you take your photos?

I use a well-floured Nikon D-610 with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, in natural light.  And occasionally a regular old iPhone.

what if i want to ask you something else or i have a suggestion?

I’d love to hear from you! Please email me at the Contact page right up at the top.  Alternatively, you can find me on the other platforms listed below.  I’d love to get to know you, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.  That said, it sometimes takes me awhile to reply, so I apologize if you don’t receive a response right away.  Even when work and life things get in the way, I promise that each and every email makes my day.

Instagram

  • A little video!  Red curry kabocha soup with @kitchenaidusa’s K400 Blender to get us through the no-man’s-land stretch between holidays and during kitchen renovations.  It’s been slow but so exciting to see our house re-emerge from under tarps and ram board, and the transition has been easier because we’ve had KitchenAid small appliances like this one to tide us over.  All you need to do is simmer a bit of Thai red curry paste with velvety coconut milk until it smells amazing, add in kaffir lime leaves and Thai basil, a little brown sugar and fish sauce, a touch of salt if you want, and blend it all up with roasted kabocha until smooth.  It ends up complex and nuanced, sweet and savory and spicy, in 10 minutes of hands-on time.  The full recipe and more about the K400 Blender is #ontheblog this morning! 📹 AND 🎶(!!) by the most talented @bowl_n2 a bowl_n1 could ever ask for 😭✨❤️ #marksofmaking #sponsored
  • What the first Sunday of December looked like four years ago:  sleeping in and baking 🍪 What it looks like this year:  a toddler doing a dance while eating peanuts, a chubby baby probably napping way too late, a tree hastily and triumphantly purchased (and now, partially trimmed before I decided to sit on my butt and Instagram). Two way more tired, but ever happier bowls. 🎄
  • There is construction just to the left of this and construction to the right 😜but in this five foot stretch only, peaceful fall things making my heart happy. 🍂✨ Happy Friday eve!
  • Honey sesame corn pudding up #ontheblog this morning in the ramp up to Thanksgiving!  I’m a bad child of the South and am new to corn pudding, but what I lack in history I’m now making up for in fervor—a crisp edge but a soft pudding center, creamy but studded with corn, sweetly decadent but just one savory note shy of dessert.  Sesame oil and sesame seeds (borrowed from the sesame cornbread in my book 😬) add a nuttiness and a tiny bit of crunch.  It ends up somehow reminiscent of toasty kettle corn and chawanmushi at the same time, and if you need me on Thanksgiving you can find me with a casserole dish of it all to myself 🌽 Recipe is on the blog this morning!  What do you guys plan to make?  Two weeks to go!! 🦃 #f52wrappedup
  • Partnering with @kitchenaidusa to share a fall pesto recipe #ontheblog this morning!  We’re working with KitchenAid for my entire kitchen and it’s one of the most exciting parts of our renovation 😱 but until the kitchen is ready, I’m sharing a few recipes made with the equally amazing small appliances that we’ve been using to cook in the meantime--like this 7 Cup Food Processor.  More on the blog along with a Sriracha & roasted broccoli pesto recipe✌🏼#ad #partner #marksofmaking
  • The start of my favorite season:  Thanksgiving Side Season. 🤓🤓🤓🤓 Googling Thanksgiving menus from now until the 28th bye!!!!!!! (And also posting this recipe soon 👏🏼)
  • One more birthday this week!! One year after #acommontablecookbook came into the world, I’m still overjoyed every time I see one of its recipes in another kitchen, or when I hear that our multicultural family is like yours, or that a recipe from my childhood is reminiscent of one from yours.  It’s more wonderful than I could have imagined when I began to write this book.  Thank you! 🙏🏼✨
  • Our newly-minted three-year-old. (Wait, what?) Loves saying something wrong just so he can correct us—it’s blue! LOL it’s not blue, it’s greeeen.  Loves ordering “crackuhs” (fries) from the kids’ picture menu but is mystified when broccoli usually appears instead (“where da crackuhs?”) Now knows birthdays mean cake and parties and has been chirping all week, “Lukie birday! Let’s go birday party! Everybody birday!” Is hilarious and maddening and tiring and wonderful, and the greatest, sweetest joy (or, one of two) we could ever have imagined.  Thank you so much for making us parents, Lukaboo.  Big camera smiles courtesy of his favorite person in the world, @bowl_n2 ❤️(more of which are on the blog this morning!)

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Recent Posts

  • red curry kabocha soup
  • honey sesame corn pudding
  • sriracha & roasted broccoli pesto
  • we’re renovating!
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