Shepherd's pie

Who doesn't love a good, well-rounded dish like shepherd's pie? Technically ground lamb should be used but I used ground beef. I've heard it called "cattle herd's pie" if ground beef was used. Anyway, I love mashed potatoes and the added bonus of veggies and beef make this meal a one dish dinner. Typically Worcestershire sauce is used, but I never have it around so I just tried to substitute it with a mixture of soy sauce and balsamic vinegar.

Who doesn't love frying up onion and garlic in a pan?

Mmmmmmm mashed potatoes

Ground beef and veggies added to the onion and garlic

Foundation of ground beef and veggies topped off with mashed potatoes

Shepherd's pie served up with a sprinkle of shredded cheese on top

Shepherd's Pie

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground beef
• ~ 8 oz frozen mixed vegetables (make sure mix has carrots and peas in it)
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 tsp of dried rosemary
• 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• garlic salt to taste
• pepper to taste
• 4 large red potatoes peeled and cut into 1.5 inch cubes
• 3 tbsp butter
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1/4 of a large onion, diced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Procedure

1. Cook the garlic and onion in the olive oil in a large pan. Preheat oven to 400F
2. While garlic and onion is cooking, boil potatoes in a large pot of water. When potatoes are mashable, drain water and mash potatoes. Season potatoes with butter, garlic salt, and pepper. Add milk to make the potatoes creamier.
3. When the garlic and onion start to turn golden, add the frozen veggies to the pan. When most of the frozen veggies seemed defrosted add soy sauce, vinegar, rosemary and ground beef. Add some pepper to taste. 
4. Cook ground beef until the beef is no longer red.
5. Pour the ground beef and vegetable mixture into a 9x9 inch baking dish. Then smoother over the mashed potatoes on top of the beef and vegetable mixture.
6. Bake the shepherd's pie at 400F for about 20 min or until mashed potato layer becomes slightly golden brown and crusty.

Apple pie from scratch...even the pie crust

I decided to try baking a pie from scratch since I had the time and I didn't feel like spending money on a pie crust. Now I know how much butter is really in a pie crust and that making pie crust is way harder than I originally thought. I have already mastered the apple pie with store-bought crust thanks to all the pie-baking I've done with my good friend Sierra. The crust tasted good, but I don't have the technique down so the texture isn't quite right. The apple filling made up for anything lacking in the crust. I wanted to do a cross-hatched/woven top crust, but I couldn't get the dough to hold properly. It kept crumbling so I just made a crumble top. Anyone trying to make the recipe better not be afraid to get their hands dirty. This is a messy process. Grating butter is harder than I originally thought. It's easy until you get close to the end you're holding that's getting all melty and hard to grate. Also, I was lucky enough to have a pie plate leftover from a store-bought pie to hold the pie since I didn't have a glass pie dish.

Grate frozen sticks of butter into the flour mixture

Mix in the butter and the flour mixture until it's all crumbly looking

Large flat surface for rolling out the dough

Thinly sliced apple arranged inside the pie. Both aesthetic and most space efficient.

Pie!

Pie crust recipe (adapted from Simply Recipes and All Recipes)

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups flour
• 2 sticks of unsalted butter frozen over night
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 7 tbsp ice cold water

Procedure

1. Mix flour, salt, sugar in large bowl.
2. Grate butter into the flour mixture and cut in the butter with two butter knives until you have coarse crumbles.
3. Stir in water a tablespoon at a time. 
4. Create two dough balls for top and bottom crust.
5. Spread one dough ball evenly over the pie pan for the bottom crust. Wrap the other dough ball in Saran wrap and refrigerate both the dough ball and the dough in the pie plate.

Apple Pie filling

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup all purpose flour
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• pinch of salt
• 6 cups of thinly sliced apples  or as much as is needed to fill the pie (I prefer Jonathan or Jonamac apples)

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 425F
2. In a medium-sized bowl, add the flour, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Mix until combined. 
3. Peel, core and thinly slice apples one at a time. Arrange the apple slices in a circular pattern in the pie dough covered pie plate. Sprinkle the flour and sugar mixture over each layer of apple slices. Do this until pie plate is full to the brim with alternating layers of apple and flour-sugar mixture. If you have remaining flour-sugar mixture, sprinkle the rest on top of the last apple slice layer.
4. Take out dough ball from fridge. To make the crumble top crust, crumble the dough ball over the top of the pie until the pie is covered in crumbled dough.
5. Bake for 40 min until crust is golden.

Potato and Leek Soup

I was at the grocery store with my roommate and saw leeks. I had been looking for leeks for a while and was going to make this awesome vegetable soup but decided to make something new: potato and leek soup. This recipe is a hybrid of several recipes I found online. The amounts of onion, green onion, and chive are all estimated because I wanted to use up the left overs in my fridge. Mushrooms were added on a whim because they are delicious and they needed to be eaten soon. I might have gotten a little carried away with the onion, but the soup turned out really  delicious. Also, most of the recipes I looked at online required a food processor or immersion blender. I don't have either of those so I just used a potato masher and a hand mixer. Who needs all those fancy gadgets? If I were to tweak this recipe, I would add a little more leek or even out the leek to onion ratio and also add either garlic salt or garlic.

Thinly sliced leek and green onion, finely chopped onion, and finely chopped mushrooms 

Magically transformed potato and leek soup after mashing

Close-up of soup served in a bowl

Potato and Leek Soup Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 leek, sliced thinly (green and light green parts only)
• 2 cups chicken stock
• half a medium onion finely chopped
• 2 tbsp chives, snipped into small pieces
• 1/2 cup green onion thinly sliced (green and light green parts only)
• 6 medium red potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 inch cubes
• 1 tbsp butter
• 4 oz mushrooms finely chopped
• 4 oz of sour cream
• salt and pepper to taste

Procedure

1. Cook leeks, mushrooms, onion, green onion, chives, salt, and pepper in the butter for about 5 minutes in a large pot.
2. Add chicken stock and potatoes.
3. Cook covered for about 20 minutes or until potatoes are soft enough to be mashed.
4. When potatoes are ready, add sour cream into the pot and mash the potatoes. Mash until you get the consistency you want.

Vegetable Panang Curry

This recipe always reminds me of my close friend who showed me how to make this curry. You can always tell how hot a curry is by the color and I will never forget that.Whenever she made it, I couldn't stand the heat but the curry was also bright red-pink. So, I have adapted her recipe and the curry I make is a respectable pinky-orange color.

Not so secret ingredient

Delicious curry cooking in the pot

My dinner!

Ingredients

• Half a medium onion, diced
• one 16 oz bag of frozen vegetable blend (I used Japanese blend)
• 3 medium potatoes peeled and cut into eighths
• 2 carrots, diced into approx 1 inch cubes (only add this if your bag of vegetables don't include carrots)
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 can of coconut milk
• 2 tbsp Panang curry paste

Procedure

1. Boil the potatoes in a pot of water into cooked but still a bit hard. Drain and set aside.
2. Meanwhile, pan fry the onion in some oil in a separate large pot on medium heat.
3. Once the diced onion is a little golden, add the carrots.
4. Defrost the frozen veggies in the microwave according to the instructions on the package.
5. When veggies are defrosted, add to the large pot with the carrots and onions. Also add the cooked potatoes.
6. Stir in the curry paste and the sugar into the large pot with the vegetables. Mix well until curry paste is evenly distributed.
7. Finally, add can of coconut milk then cover the pot and let the curry come to a boil. Then let the curry simmer for about 10 minutes.
8. Serve with rice.

Shrimp and chive omelet

This is a very traditional Chinese/Cantonese dish that I ate a lot of when I was a kid. My dad would usually put in some onions but I was lazy this morning. Usually this dish is served for an afternoon or evening meal and not breakfast, but today I had it for breakfast. I believe this dish is pretty easy to make and not that "Chinese" at all. It's just a little unusual to see a pairing of chives and shrimp in an omelet in American cooking. I do have one really vivid memory about this dish. One time we were having family dinner at my parent's restaurant and a drunk customer comes up to the table and asked to try some of this omelet; then he goes ahead and tries a bite with his bare hands before we even get a chance to respond. Anyhoo, he liked it. Then he paid his bill and left. I never forgot it because it was so comical. I believe he was wearing a t-shirt that said "Silly rabbit, dicks are for chicks." It's funny how I can remember little details like this and forget important stuff like different ways to optimize a batch reaction. Ah, I digress.

All ingredients mixed in a bowl before being cooked.

Finished product

Close-up of finished product

Ingredients

• 4 large eggs
• ~ 2 tbsp of chives washed and cut into approximately 1 inch pieces (I usually just put in however much I want.)
• 12 small shrimp
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 tsp oil

Procedure

1. Mix all ingredients into an appropriately sized bowl.
2. Put oil in pan at med heat.
3. Pour in half of the mixture into the pan.
4. Cook until shrimp turn slightly pink and the egg is cooked enough to be flipped. Flip the omelet and cook for another 1-2 min. Then place omelet on plate when done.
5. Repeat step 4 with the remaining mixture.