christmas Archives - Two Red Bowls

jianbing strata

12.21.2018

There is room yet for cinnamon rolls and cookies and hot chocolate on our Christmas morning breakfast spread, and I have plans aplenty to make all of these between now and Tuesday. But this strata, a little bit eccentric but a lot a bit amazing, has just muscled its way onto the table. I vaguely recall first learning of jianbing, the street cart phenomenon originally from Shandong and Tianjin, from Mandy at Lady and Pups–apparently, more than three years ago!–but it wasn’t until last fall that I first tried it in person, in all its saucy, spicy-and-savory-yet-a-little-sweet, chewy-yet-crunchy complexity.

butterscotch mochi bars // a common table giveaway!

12.14.2018

It’s two months of A Common Table giveaways! From now until December, I’ll be sharing a recipe from the cookbook here and holding a giveaway of one of my favorite kitchen treasures used in the book every week, and you’ll have a week to enter before the winner is announced, along with a new giveaway. This post is in partnership with Pyrex. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

The time has come–it’s the very last A Common Table giveaway. What a couple of months it’s been! It has been so incredibly special seeing the book in your hands, all the things you’ve made, and reading all your stories and kind words. I can’t thank you enough for sharing with me and for making this a dream come true.

shanghainese lion’s head meatballs // a common table giveaway!

11.09.2018

It’s two months of A Common Table giveaways! From now until December, I’ll be sharing a recipe from the cookbook here and holding a giveaway of one of my favorite kitchen treasures used in the book every week on Instagram, and you’ll have a week to enter before the winner is announced, along with a new giveaway.

These lion’s head meatballs are one of the handful of recipes in the book that was originally on my blog. It was one of the very first, actually, posted nearly five years ago to the day! And whenever I’ve been asked what my favorite recipe in the book is, I’ve had to say it’s this. First, and perhaps most importantly, it’s just one of the most delicious things I’ve ever made: The meatballs are a marvel, tender, light, and juicy like little clouds that practically melt into your rice. They’re burnished brown on the outside from a quick fry, then steamed over an impossibly tall pile of bok choy until the greens wilt into a flavorful heap under the juices from the meatballs, so you get a full meal with a side all in one. They’re one of my favorite winter meals, one we used to make in the depths of Brooklyn winters while the world outside was frosted white, and they’re so good that they’ve become one of the most made recipes I’ve ever posted (and, to my utter surprise, even won a contest once!)

asian pear and jasmine crumbles // a common table giveaway!

11.02.2018

It’s two months of A Common Table giveaways! From now until December, I’ll be sharing a recipe from the cookbook here and holding a giveaway of one of my favorite kitchen treasures used in the book every week on Instagram, and you’ll have a week to enter before the winner is announced, along with a new giveaway.

My earliest memories of Asian pears are from my grandparents’ kitchen in a concrete high-rise in bustling Shanghai, sitting around an old, worn table under fluorescent lights after a long flight from the United States. Asian pears are meant to be eaten peeled, and I can still see the ribbons of peels as they curled off my grandmother’s paring knife, seamless, swift, and unbroken, piling around the slices as she set them before us. (To my mother’s dismay, this is not a skill I have ever mastered.)

cookies and christmas pjs

12.20.2017

Hi! In less than three days, we’re jumping on (or, more accurately, “squeezing a toddler and many bags and a stroller and a car seat onto”) a plane and heading to Hawaii for the first time since our two-bowl household became a three-bowl one. There are aunties and uncles and cousins for Luke to meet for the first time, beaches to explore, galbi to chew on, and to say we–and even more, his grandparents–are excited would be an understatement. Our fellow passengers are probably less excited, though they don’t know it yet. (If you have any tips for entertaining a 14-month old in an enclosed space for five hours, I welcome them and our seatmates will thank you.)

super savory greens with lap cheong and garlic

12.06.2017

We are now solidly into the magical stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, that no-holds-barred span of weeks that I typically use to indulge all of my wildest cookie and hot cocoa and cinnamon roll whims, and yet, much to my dismay, I’ve spent most of it so far thinking about, not chocolate or candy canes or marshmallows, but vegetables. In particular, these leafy greens. I am as surprised as you are.

sticky toffee pudding with mascarpone butterscotch

11.15.2017

I’ve been meaning to make some form of sticky toffee pudding for at least a few years, ever since a friend of mine first waxed lyrical about one she’d had at a pub near our offices called the Shakespeare. At that point, I’d never had sticky toffee pudding or, possibly, even heard of it, but her description alone had me sold–of a sticky, soft, eat-it-with-a-spoon cake, gooey with dates and draped in an abundance of caramel sauce, served warm and ideally with ice cream on top (which, in and of itself, is enough to get me on board with anything).

peppermint mochi

12.08.2015

Oh man, it’s been not-enough-hours-in-the-day days around here lately. Most of the time it is safe to ignore me when I say that because I spend about half my waking hours huffing to B2 about the “million things I have to do” and then the other half of those hours on the couch doing zero of those things until it is too late to do them, but for once, it actually has been a little nonstop from one thing to the next. One of them is a very good one, though, and it’s that one of my good friends, source of indispensable life advice, and surrogate jie jie has been in town with her new (!) and awesome fiancé! They’ve been staying with us and I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m convinced that having house guests is one of my favorite ways to see friends. I get to feel like a real grown-up person when I put out “guest linens” and coffee accoutrements “in case you want to make some in the morning” (even if I have a couch instead of a guest bedroom and I forget to put out that cone that goes in the Hario so actually you cannot make some in the morning, oops), and it fits right in with my lazy-homebody agenda (see, e.g., dinner parties) because when things get hectic for them or me, there’s still always time before bed to sit and chat in pajamas and eat cookies even though you already brushed your teeth.

sticky date cinnamon rolls

12.02.2015

Hi friends! How was your Thanksgiving? We spent ours with my parents and my brother last week, in a couple of slow, wonderful days at home. It was pretty exciting — we sat around and told the same stories for the eighty-seventh time each, I woke up way earlier than you’d ever usually find me so that I could have sleepy coffees with my dad, my sole responsibilities at any given point were not overfilling the wonton wrappers (I failed) and making sure my mom got a Black Friday discount on a jewelry box from J.C. Penney, and my little brother drove me around everywhere because I’m very lazy and he’s nice and he “misses driving anyway.” So actually it was zero percent exciting. (But one hundred percent awesome.)

date & maple butter tarts

11.04.2015

So I think I’m about five years late to this party. But I am newly, and really, obsessed with dates. They are so good. How are they so good? I don’t know how I was so woefully misinformed, but up until a couple months ago I had this idea that dates were just a vague something to be nibbled on at your grandmother’s house if all the cookies were gone, or maybe used as a convenient vehicle for goat cheese and bacon, or admired from afar as a healthful “substitute-for” things I am generally reluctant to substitute. And then I was gifted a box of really great ones, with fancy things like orange peel and almonds tucked inside, and my world was totally rocked. This is probably news only to me at this point, but it turns out dates are pretty much candy. They have a consistency like caramel and nearly the same buttery taste; they’re sticky and soft and reminiscent of wonderful things like honey, cinnamon and molasses. B2 was unmoved by my date revolution (although he hasn’t gotten tired of responding to “Want a date?” with “I thought we were already married. Get it?”) but, with or without him, I’m fairly sure I’ve eaten my weight in them since April.